Cable a Tierra is an experimental, ambient sound track originally written for the documentary film The Sky Commodified (2019). The film initiated with an IAP course/field trip to the Atacama desert in Chile also titled “The Sky Commodified”, led by MIT alumni architect Maya Shopova, architect Romea Muryn, and filmmaker Francisco Lobos. During the trip, students, filmmakers, and artists explored the vast territory of the Atacama desert looking to understand its geography, its connection to the sky, the tourist industry, the copper and lithium mines, and the indigenous perspective to this land.
Cable a Tierra was composed almost completely of field recordings captured on-site at various observatories in the Atacama Desert in Chile by Nicole L’Huillier, Carlos Cabezas, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre (SMACT ’18), Eric Maltz, and Kevin Marblestone. The soundscapes presented explore the rich acoustic economy of the Atacama Desert, the deep connection between earth and space, the translation of distant quasars from light to data, the wind as it travels across ancient rock, through modern industrial structures of steel and wire.
A beautiful, otherworldly journey through time and space, at times mysterious, dark, nervous, innocent, beautiful, transcendent, at the edge of understanding. It is the sound of the earth, the sound of our stars, the universe made audible. Cable a Tierra.
