Nicolas Montgermont
Chronicle of a Foretold End
— Lecture and live performance
Sunday, 27 Sept 20:00 / MX
“What they call orbit is my ground.”
In August 2025, the last analog weather satellites in the United States were shut down by the Trump administration. A final communication from the NOAA 19 satellite was picked up: a mixture of an image taken above Europe and a voice recounting the satellite’s soul-searching about its role as a human artifact…
Chronicle of a Foretold End is a film and performance based on a radio recording made by the artist. The NOAA 19 satellite transmitted a signal that was both image and sound: a 120 BPM pulse can be heard while a photo of the Earth is displayed line by line, evolving with the satellite’s movement. On top of this hypnotic and rhythmic recording, played back in real time, is a fictional voiceover that explores the technical and philosophical questions raised by the presence of such objects in Earth’s orbit. It delves into their role in the human-cosmic relationship, the poetry of their orbits, and the long-term future of a decommissioned satellite.
Nicolas Montgermont is a sound and radio artist who explores the physicality of waves in their multiple forms. After studying at IRCAM, he conducted research in musical acoustics before turning his practice toward artistic creation.
For the past twenty years, he has been designing devices that explore the poetic, physical, and political essence of waves through a critical approach to the relationships between sound, time, and listening. His work engages with the materiality and processes specific to sonic and electromagnetic media: resonance within spaces, vibration of materials, the richness of invisible radio landscapes, listening to cosmic waves, the musicality of interferences, antenna sculpture, territories of transmission, and the politics of broadcast. His experiments seek to reveal the conditions of existence of sound and radio — their regimes of perception and their social and technical implications.