Debuted in January in ‘List Projects 34: Brittany Nelson’ (2026) at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the video treats the possibility of contact that the telescope synecdochically teases as an object of obsession; running along the bottom of the screen, lines from Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca (1938) conjure the weather of the narrator’s queer-coded fascination with her husband’s late wife, whose absence drives the plot. Radio telescopes become inadvertent monuments to fruitless attempts at connection. (This topic is also taken up by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s The Great Silence, 2014, made with science fiction writer Ted Chiang and featured this summer in the two-part show ‘Palomar’ at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the video juxtaposes the pored-over quiet of extraterrestrial life with the overlooked ‘alien’ intelligence of vocalizing parrots, who here symbolically ‘use’ the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to relay their message.) Stymied by the Fermi Paradox – the high likelihood of alien civilizations existing and the dearth of evidence for as much – as they compulsively scan ‘waterhole’ frequencies in search of extraterrestrial intelligence, humans start to sound a lot like Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse (1977): ‘The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.’