Harvestworks Art and Technology Program presented Nick Brooke’s artwork extant, in the exhibition Time Based Art: Space and Time in Tune, from May 17-Aug 24 2025. extant is an immersive sonic installation about mechanisms for navigation—based on my grandfather’s sextant, which he used to disappear to Tahiti (I never met him). I’m using modern technologies (mini-gyros, arduinos and surround sound) and connecting them to older ways of navigation (the sextant) to make an audience see, touch, and learn these devices.

Full text from the exhibit:

“ I got left my grandfather’s sextant, a sea navigation device, along with his diaries, which reflect a growing obsession with Tahiti, then celestial navigation, then scribblings of how to make the trip: charts of Venus and the sun. I never met him. He left my Dad, sailing around the world. In the last years, I’ve learned to navigate, and I see this hand-me-down as a way to find him.

The sextant is based on imprecise science--it relies on where you thought you were yesterday, on the high seas, to predict your current position. In this installation, try the sextant out: line up a star with the horizon in the split lens. As you do this, your location is sensed, but always in respect with where you were a while ago. The longer you are in the installation, the longer the generative system loses itself.

Extant reflects on “absence-of-field” effects— classic psychoacoustic experiments, such as Shepard tones and rhythm--acoustical barber poles--that are based on how fast they travel, not where they are, and they get lost over time. Amidst this sonic disorientation, you orient yourself against programmed odds. “