Here's our Joshua tree.

This piece of copper is connected to a coax cable over here.

That power, even though it doesn't touch the tree, surrounds the tree and that field of energy then taps into the electric energy in the tree to turn the whole thing into an antenna.

[music] Remote sensing is about interacting with an object without touching it.

It often deals with finding high ground and looking down to see what you can see when you're further away from it.

Remote sensing is anything that extends the senses of your body.

Flying a kite is a kind of remote sensing.

Fishing is a kind of remote sensing.

It's making visible something that we think of as invisible.

It seems like the electronic version of the world is increasingly the primary experience we have with place.

The current exhibit, the projects are about the things that occur between the object and the perception of an object.

This is science.

It's an industry as well as a process of perception.

[music] I met some of these scientists and engineers at JPL who said, "We are trying to develop space missions that last for hundreds of years, and so how do we think about designing technology that can last for 200 years?"

We eventually realized that trees have a certain electrical property that can be harnessed to become part of a large living antenna system.

We have sensors that write data every minute about water, light, and temperature.

We have a loop antenna.

The antenna extends the energy to include the properties of the tree so that the whole thing becomes a part of this large antenna system.

The antenna is picking up a range of satellites, so we have this ongoing record of data at the tree.

Then here in real time, I'm sonifying that data.

We take those numbers and we've written a little piece of custom software that translates those numbers into audio frequencies that you can hear, so we have a song of the tree.

There's a sort of magic and poetry as you're listening, and there's a slight change in the frequency.

You're like, "Oh, there's some moisture creeping in."

You also hear every now and then pings coming from satellites in space.

You're in our main exhibit space here at the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

On the top layer here, we've got three screens that are showing animations made by JPL of different remote sensing satellites.

The center screen shows some of the orbitings that go on with these satellite platforms.

Then the third one looks at the scanning technology that is engaged in some of the satellites doing remote sensing.

The second layer of images are ground-based images of places related to remote sensing technology and aerospace history in Southern California, ranging from Goleta down to San Diego.

[music] Deborah Stratman, one of the artists we're working with at the Desert Research Station, she's building an antenna to detect waves that are coming from much higher up in the ionosphere, which is not space, but not atmosphere.

It's sort of right in between those two things.

This is a model of the very low-frequency antenna that Steve and I are going to build.

Right now, it's about eight inches from center to exterior, and out there would be roughly eight feet.

In a way, it's helping us problem-solve, because winding it at a big scale is going to be a real bear.

The antenna, in part, is picking up ways that the ionosphere gets resonated.

It's a space that is alive and responds to the sun and electromagnetic radiation from space, so we also do project things onto it and bounce off of it for communication.

“Now TV stations can reach out beyond the horizon, around the curve of the earth.” Sometimes you'll hear just the lightning hits, which is called spherics, and it just sounds like crackly static.

It's like if lightning was a mallet, lightning hits the cavity and it starts resonating.

In addition to picking up natural radio, it also picks up man-made electromagnetic frequencies, which are generated by everything here.

By the high-tension power lines, by your cell phone, by the transformers up above.

The receiver we're building can pick that up as well.

[music] The very low-frequency antenna we're building will both be an antenna that's catching radio frequencies and also it's harvesting energy directly from the air.

This thing we're making hopefully doesn't kill us, A, snd B, it's going to draw power directly from the air in a way.

It's going to induce electricity.

We don't need to power it.

That's what she's exploring, is that idea that there's things out there.

You can collect energy from the sky.

I guess I like simple tools that pull a curtain and reveal what's always there but we're not able to attune to it.

To me, finding the simplest means possible to open another door or window to phenomena that are always there and that are maybe in some cases very fundamental to what life and experience is but that we dont tap into has been important to me.

We like for trees to be central components in this technology because it means we have to take care of them.

It also makes us think about technology and think about design in terms of designing around nature, designing for living things rather than altering the living things for our technological needs.

Experiencing the Joshua tree, you'll hear this song, which is sort of a way to bring these different forces out of the ether into sound.

We like this idea of distilling these sort of earthly aspects, light, water, temperature, into a sine wave that can be sent out into space and tell a story about conditions on Earth.

Eventually, the idea is the aggregate of these songs over the course of decades or centuries would be inscribed on the side of spacecrafts and sent out into the cosmos to tell a story.

[music] In a way, remote sensing has evolved into a sort of global view.

Remote sensing has become everybody's sort of interaction and sensation of space.

Everybody's engaged in feeding information that helps to create a bigger and more accurate picture of human behavior on the planet.

The exhibit we have both here in Los Angeles and at the Desert Research Station is, I guess, fundamentally an exploration of the physical places and activities that have engendered this digital globe to exist.

The importance of terrestrial resources, of sustainability, those are things that remote sensing helps to steer our way into a future that isn't the end of the world but the beginning of another one.