Antenn a*

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Instrument for imagining Sagittarius A

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On the evening of August 23rd, a group of twenty people gathered to peer and listen toward the center of the galaxy, using an instrument inspired by the world’s first radio telescope. The idea had been in development for two and a half years before we were finally able to realize it in National Park Dwingelderveld, a designated radio-quiet zone.

Sjoerd Knibbeler is an Amsterdam-based visual artist whose work explores the boundaries of photography, science and constructed reality. Rather than documenting the visible world, Knibbeler builds intricate visual experiments to make intangible physical phenomena—such as the flow of air and water, light, or the passage of time—perceptible through photographic means. 

For his latest project, he has been imagining black holes. After a residency at the Niels Bohr Institute, he came up with the idea of capturing Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. With a relatively low-tech antenna, it is possible topick up the faint, noisy radio signals emitted by Sag A*. With a large-scale camera obscura, we translated the black hole’s position—just above the southern horizon—into a visible presence in the Dwingelerveld.

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