To Hear a Shadow Launch & Conversation
September 27, 2025 | 6:30-8pm
Location: Slash (1150 25th St, Building B, San Francisco)
Free event
Join artists Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary in conversation with Vivian Sming about their recent book project, To Hear a Shadow, published by Sming Sming Books. The evening will commence with a discussion followed by a short sound performance timed to coincide with the passing of a weather satellite overhead. This will be an outdoor event.
To Hear a Shadow is the culmination of a research project into weather satellites. Over the course of two years, artists Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary used open-source radio technology and a hand-built antenna to intercept transmissions from aging NOAA satellites (officially decommissioned in June 2025). The images they found traveling invisibly through the air became the scaffolding for this book. Meanwhile, they fell down a rabbit hole, sifting through declassified Cold War era documents surrounding earth-imaging and the utility of vertical perspectives to the state. This ultimately led the artists to speculative questions surrounding the relationship between network infrastructure, militarization, and cosmic forces beyond human agency.