The Last Song Radio
Works from Xu Bing's Satellite Art Residency Project
2025
The inspiration for the work "The Last Song Radio" is deeply rooted in a realistic yet poetic contradiction in human space exploration: satellite probes, as the ultimate embodiment of human wisdom and courage, will eventually face "the end of life" when their service period expires or they fail due to malfunctions.
Whether it is the active "evaporation" scheme proposed by the Russian Space Agency, such as orbital crash or re-entry into the atmosphere, or like the Kepler probe of NASA, which receives the final "goodnight" command and is permanently disconnected after running out of fuel, each satellite's "death" is marked by the efforts and accompanying loss of human exploration of the universe.
"The Last Song Radio" focuses on the satellites and spacecraft that self-destructed due to retirement or failure in the history of human space exploration. It records the names and self-destruction dates of these spacecraft on a 3D-rendered digital monument. Through simulated noises such as explosion, combustion, circuit short-circuit, and communication shutdown, the SCA-1 art satellite is transformed into a murmuring monument, a "radio station" wandering in the Earth's orbit, playing the "farewell messages" left by those satellites to humanity. The audience of the "radio station" is not only humans on the ground, but also possibly a third party in the vast universe.
WORK
CV