Albedo Prospect

Ed Osborn spent an intensive period at EMPAC editing video footage for his installation and performance, Albedo Prospect. Based in part on Arthur Koestler’s reports from a 1931 airship flight to the high Arctic, Albedo Prospect explores polar imagery using video, sound, still images, and text. Koestler’s newspaper dispatches from this journey are part of the public record; the radio transmissions were lost, but these broadcasts were noted for their vivid and entrancing accounts of the terrain. This piece reimagines these lost reports using audio and video, updated with an awareness of how personal, journalistic, and scientific narratives shape our knowledge and readings of polar geographies.

Osborn’s sound art pieces take many forms including installation, sculpture, radio, video, performance, and public projects. His works combine a visceral sense of space, sound, and motion with an economy of materials, and are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic.