Project Description Zombie satellites still drift through space, sending faint signals back to Earth. Like the “Odradek” from Franz Kafka’s The Cares of a Family Man—an object without purpose or reason, yet never disappearing—these satellites have long completed their missions but remain in orbit, leaking ghostly transmissions. Space Odradek is a sound installation that receives these signals in real time, converts them into data, ands sculptural “Odradeks” in motion. In the exhibition, antennas and transmitters capture and interpret satellite signals, while kinetic sculptures respond to them. Arranged radially across the floor, the Odradeks absorb distant echoes from space, transforming the data into light and sound that spread throughout the gallery. Rather than carrying clear information or messages, the signals take shape as incomplete noise, drifting rhythms, and intangible vibrations. Though it begins with satellites that have outlived their missions, the project does not regard them simply as obsolete machines. Instead, it searches for meaning and possibility in what has lost its purpose. The remnants of technology and traces of outdated systems, often overlooked, are reconfigured here into a sensory experience—inviting us to reconsider the relationships between humans, machines, and the cosmos. What lingers after technology fades may, in fact, mark the beginning of another narrative. About the Creator Collective Bremen Musicians is a project group formed in Bremen, Germany, by Sangbong Lee, Boeun Kim, and Chi Him Chik. For ZER01NE, they reinterpret drifting satellite signals, seeking to reveal invisible presences and latent narratives. Lee explores the mechanical presence of objects through hardware-based sculpture and system design; Kim experiments with the thresholds between body and material; and Chik approaches sound as a medium of emotion and language. Together, their work Space Odr brings forth hidden sensations and new possibilities of existence from the traces of obsolete technologies and the subtle vibrations that often go unnoticed within technological narratives.

Curator's Note In space, there are “dead stars” that still send signals back to Earth. Known as “zombie satellites”, they have outlived their orbital lifespans yet remain adrift, leaking faint transmissions. Their missions are over, their data meaningless, their destinations long gone. Are they truly dead, or have they become something else—entities that persist in a different form? Space Odradek builds devices that capture and interact with such signals, probing the uncanny vitality of technolol remnants. At the threshold where notions of ‘use’ collapse or shift, we are asked: what do we still sense as presence, and what do we begin to recognize as a new kind of being? Space Odradek is a sound installation in which signals from orbiting zombie satellites are received in real time, convd into data, and used to animate kinetic sculptures called “Odradeks.” The point of departure is Franz Kafka’s short story The Cares of a Family Man, which features the mysterious object Odradek—spoked like a wheel and wound with thread, seemingly useless, yet never vanishing. Through Odradek, Kafka captured a strange autonomy that lingers even after function disappears, a presence that persists in the time of the “useless.” The project reweaves this literary metaphor with the technological reality of satellites, making visible the traces of relations embedded in systems now treated as scrap. Antennas reach outward, catching the faint breath of zombie satellites and passing their signals into transmitters, processors, and finally into the Odradek sculptures, which stir in response. Scattered radially across the floor, these Odradeks seem to drink in echoes drifting from distant orbit. What comes through the converters is not a message to be read, but a residue: flickers of light, splinters of sound, rhythms that hover, vibrations that tremble at the edge of perception. This unfinished noise carries the weight of ‘uselessness’, reminding us that even stripped of purpose, objects can still pulse with vitality—felt, remembered, and briefly reanimated. As in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monolith unsettles human perception and evolution, these unresolved signals raise questions from beyond the bounds of comprehension. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, memory and existence blur the line between reality and illusion—just as the residue of satellite transmissions hovers between the ghost of lost function and the seed of new narratives. And in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), NASA’s Voyager 6 is reborn as “V’Ger” after being reconfigured by alien life, suggesting that when technology exceeds its function, it can shift into another mode of existence. Together, these narratives of cosmic solitude and fractured identity resonate with the idea that orbital debris may be more than inert machines: they can be reframed as active subjects within a web of continuing relations. Freed from mission and utility, these entities speak through unpredictability and resistance to interpretation. Technology may be designed for usefulness, but in its residues and byproducts we confront its essence—and our own place within it—anew. e Odradek reads ‘uselessness’ and ‘remnants’ not as waste but as an ecology, a narrative in their own right. By revisiting what has been discarded, the work imagines new orbits of existence, where disappearance and persistence, meaning and its unraveling, continuously recombine. Within this process, the work asks what it means to exist within the vast mesh of human–machine–cosmos. One day our own technologies, like Odradeks in orbit, may lose function and drift through other times and spaces. When that day comes, how will we remember them, and what names will we give? The query continues.