research at stars

My work is nearly done for the magnificent project Yelling at Stars, Australia's first interstellar message. It will be performed live at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on May 31 at 9pm, recorded and streamed live to Deep Space Communications in Florida, and beamed four light years into space. Its free so you should come.
The research component is now seeing the light of day on the website www.yellingatstars.com, with new chapters coming online every few days in the lead up to the show. These chapters represent months of research into topics as titillating as the history of interstellar messaging, questions of message composition and ethics, the development of an artistic practice to match the scale of space, semiotics and meaning in interstellar messaging, linguistic archaeology and the search for the 'fundamental' language, space art and other enormously fun things.
Apart from the joy of working with Willoh S Weiland (director, writer, performer) and Pip Norman (sound design/composition, and my husband), has been the great opportunities arising from the project.
Most exciting on the horizon is the success of our submission to the Less Remote Symposium in Glasgow later this year, which means we will be presenting findings from the project to this symposium on space and the humanities. This will be my first presentation at a symposium, and my first funded academic jaunt. Hopefully I will also incorporate my Soundscape Research (see previous entry) into the travel, with some visits to members of the International Urban Soundscape Research Group in Denmark, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
This project also represents my first big Art, and my first time on stage as a performer since the 1994 Rock Eisteddfod where I danced as a jockey.
When I stop to think about it, my real fear is standing on stage at the Bowl - a very very big stage - not the prospect of being eliminated in nanoseconds by superintelligent entities offended by our taste in sound art.