FRKTL - Azimuth

In Azimuth, audiovisual artist Sarah Badr channels a tension between organic and synthetic forms, digitally rendering pulsating alien objects and shimmering surfaces that change and transform in a responsive, symbiotic relationship with the tactile sounds she corals into the intricate texture of her compositions. Resolutely synesthetic, Azimuth oscillates between the recogniseable and the impossible, a dichotomy that is suggested in the work’s title. An azimuth, in geometry, is an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system and is derived from the Arabic word السَّمْت. When applied in astrology and used as a celestial coordinate, an azimuth is the horizontal direction of a star, or other astronomical object. In one sense the title, and the work, is functional, referring to a unit of measurement, but when applied to the world around us it becomes ontological, a marker for locating an object in physical, or artificial, space. This duality is not on