Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian: Interstellar Communication as Cultural Resistance

In Piccadilly Un:Plugged, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian uses noise, public installations and scientific inquiry to explore decolonization, interstellar communication and identity

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian Blends Art, Science and Politics

For Doctor Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, the lines between art, science and politics do not exist – rather, these disciplines are overlapping tools in her advocacy for pluralism, sustainability and counterculture. 

It is this purpose that unites her projects, which span from founding the International Space Orchestra at NASA to interviewing Noam Chomsky with a puppet version of Hannah Arendtfor 2019’s I Am (Not) a Monster and touring the United Kingdom with a giant inflatable octopus for her Tour de Moon festival. 

Last year, Ben Hayoun-Stépanian was nominated for the SXSW Vision Award for Doppelgängers³, a film contemplating sustainable, eco-feminist visions for expansion into space. Alongside interviews with the SETI Institute’s Doctor Jill Tarter and LGBTQIA+ activist Lilit Martirosyan, it featured a soundtrack from Pussy Riot, the Russian band whose anti-Putin activism saw its members arrested and jailed in 2012.

Piccadilly Un:Plugged: Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is partnering with Art of London and New Public on an immersive public installation in London’s West End

Expanding on the questions raised in Doppelgängers³, Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is partnering with Art of London and New Public on an immersive public installation in London’s West End. Uniting international space agencies, astronomers and acclaimed musicians with underground voices and noise artists, Piccadilly Un:Plugged invites the public to look into the vast cosmos and contemplate the futures it offers. 

Running from 6 to 8 March,it isa takeover of Piccadilly Circus with asteroid-sized moon rocks and UV-activated versions of Schrödinger’s Cat. The installation also involves what Ben Hayoun-Stépanian describes as a «collaboration with the moon», where recordings from the West End, music from performers like The Avalanches and the heartbeats of her Armenian family will travel 768,800 kilometres to the moon and back. The distorted sound signals that return to Earth will be broadcast to the public.

Leading up to Piccadilly Un:Plugged, I spoke with Ben Hayoun-Stépanian about her visions for the future of space exploration, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and biopolitics. In the interview, we contemplate the power of «chaotic noise» as a form of cultural resistance designed to complicate monolithic narratives by exposing the limitations of our language, the value of public art as a means for creating broader engagement with science, and the power of creativity in conceptualising new realities.

Interview with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Joshua Beutum. What is the intention behind Piccadilly Un:Plugged? 

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian: It’s a call to action for the public because it’s galaxy season in March. This is a moment where if you’re anywhere in the world, you can look up and see the stars and planets and the moon much better than on a normal day. For the installation, the public will be supported in seeing the galaxy through telescopes positioned in different locations around the West End. 

It’s also about pluralism. It’s quirky as always – there are giant cats in the middle of Leicester Square, extraterrestrial rocks with speakers to listen to music being sent to the moon and back. All of this is completely iridescent, chromatic. It doesn’t have to be white. And that’s the point. The future of space exploration, the future of humanity, doesn’t have to be white. It can be an overload of senses and textures. A rocket doesn’t have to be white; it can be fluorescent pink. 

J.B. Your film Doppelgängers³ contemplated sustainable, eco-feminist and pluralist visions for expansion into space. How does Piccadilly Un:Plugged extend on these ideas? 

N.B.H.S. For any decolonial process, according to Frantz Fanon, we must build a universal experience. In Piccadilly Un:Plugged, we’re looking at new methods to consider our future in a way that’s eco-feminist and respectful of all life, even extraterrestrial life. Part of the installation involves brainstorming with local youth groups. We invited them to reflect on the representation of extraterrestrials and question these images. They don’t have to be like the ones we’ve been force-fed by Hollywood, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

That’s why we’re collaborating with the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and the Jodrell Bank Observatory, among other international agencies. We’re thinking about future missions involving queer, trans and non-binary humans because that’s what’s needed for our survival in space. 

J.B. How do you hope we’re going to engage with extraterrestrial life? 


N.B.H.S. This is a big question because extraterrestrial life has the potential to start World War Three if one nation finds something and thinks it’s from a hostile neighbour, not from another planet. 

Everyone has a valuable perspective. I’m part of the SETI Permanent Committee at the International Academy of Astronautics. It’s composed of scientists, people from cultural sectors, people who study animals. We’re designing protocols for what to do if someone finds extraterrestrial intelligence.

We’re working on a new protocol involving social media. Everything must be open source. Once we verify any data about extraterrestrial Intelligence, it must go into the public domain at the same time it goes to the United Nations. There’s no moment where the information is being held from the public. 

Challenging Established Knowledge: It’s a trans-vision – we must evolve to survive

J.B. The fact you’re working with the International Academy of Astronautics highlights the value of creative perspectives in traditionally scientific disciplines. What is the relationship between art and the sciences?

N.B.H.S. Art comes first, then science. The rational mind was developed after human expression. From the moment of human existence, we have expressed ourselves. Before language was invented, we were looking for a form of expression to interact directly with living things and other environments. 

Then, rationality came about. In 2025, our pool of knowledge and sets of references are byproducts of the Industrial Revolution. We’re still living with the same ideas inherited from liberal and capitalist systems that began in the 1910s. These have not changed since we started using technology. 

J.B. What does it mean that our knowledge and references are from the Industrial Revolution?

N.B.H.S. When we think about our futures, we cannot eradicate everything that happened before the Industrial Revolution, just because at a certain point our patriarchal societies decided that this is all there was and that ancestral forms of knowledge had no value for how we speak about the futures. 

I’m advocating for an acknowledgement of ancestral knowledge and expression – which often comes from Indigenous cultures. It’s about how to shift from the imperialist understandings of extraction, emancipation and expansion that have carried over from capitalism. We must start looking afresh at ideas that are more universal, more eco-feminist and more respectful of our living environment. 

J.B. Where will these new forms of knowledge come from?

N.B.H.S. There are a lot of post-human theories in queer culture and in queer knowledge, like cyborgs and Afrofuturism. These post-human ideas are about understanding that we must transform. It’s a trans-vision – we must evolve to survive. There’s a real conversation to be had about biopolitics and how we’re going to transform and adapt in the coming years, especially as we venture into alien territories. 

But this cannot be achieved by thinking with the same mindset that we’ve inherited from the Industrial Revolution. We must start thinking differently. We need to embrace countercultures, especially the nightlife community. There is a lot of innovation in this specific nightlife sector because it’s one that doesn’t exist within the establishment of the rational world that we have built for ourselves.

Nightlife Culture and Creativity to Change Established Knowledge

J.B. What’s the value of incorporating nightlife culture into our study of the universe?

N.B.H.S. Investigating the universe requires the discomfort of trying to understand where we are in relation to the cosmos. We might not be able to use traditional types of knowledge to answer that question. 

Embracing this new reality means we are forced to question our bases of knowledge. Space expansion – like nightlife – doesn’t conform to the parameters that we have used to live on this planet. We must look at other sides of our brains and new types of thinking to survive for the coming years. 

J.B. How would we access those alternative sides of the mind? 

N.B.H.S. Creativity. Understanding the impact of creativity is at the heart of Piccadilly Un:Plugged. In Doppelgängers³, we spoke to a political theorist called Professor Uday Mehta, who said that there is a degree of insanity that comes with contemplating space exploration. The idea of going to space is mad. So, we can’t go about it by thinking about colonisation and mining the moon – or with other so-called rational thoughts. 

Creativity is something we need to embrace and support because that’s what makes us human. If we have anything to bring to the future, it is creativity. We must support it and create space for it. We’re going to have to put our thinking caps on because these things are much more complex. 

Interstellar Communication and The Power of Noise

J.B. You’re sending recordings of the West End, plus the work of queer and underground voices, musicians and artists to the moon and back. You’re also sending recordings of your family’s heartbeats. What technology do you need to achieve this? 

N.B.H.S. You have a transmitter on one side of the world, and it’s sending a signal to the moon. It kicks to the moon; that’s the best way of thinking about this. Then the moon absorbs it and sends the signal back. 

Our job is to capture that signal being sent back. On Earth, there’s a receiver at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester, which is a UNESCO heritage site. Usually, their receiver is only listening to the cosmos for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. But in this context, they’ve captured the sound that’s come back from what we’ve sent to the moon. That’s what we are hearing in Piccadilly Circus. 

J.B. What does that sound like? 

N.B.H.S. Distorted. The moon absorbs a lot of the content, and we are also capturing the sound of the static, the leftover sound of the Big Bang. What we get back is horrific – it has no melody; it’s quite damaging to the ear. It’s not beautiful, not like an unreleased track from Massive Attack. 

J.B. What is the value of this noise?

N.B.H.S. There are noise artists talking about how noise can heal humanity. This installation is in memory of noise and avant-garde artist EOBIONT, who passed away this week. So, we’re also holding space for grief.

EOBIONT (also known as Láwû Makuriye’nt, Mango and half of Mirrored Fatality) was involved in the underground community and produced tracks for the project. Láwû engaged with the world with love but also rage. Rage for what history should never be again, rage against the establishment, rage and noise as a form of healing.

So now, Piccadilly Un:Plugged is about noise as a form of healing and dealing with rage and grief through music and collaboration with the cosmos. It’s about building a federation of care where people support each other, hold each other in grief. This love, which has been ridiculed, is the biggest contribution that humanity has to the cosmos. I hope this sensation will be powerful and resonate with members of the audience. I don’t know if it will, but it’s okay for everyone to make their own interpretation. 

Making Noise as Cultural Resistance

J.B. How does making noise and sending it into the universe contribute to cultural resistance?

N.B.H.S. I think communities, regardless of where they come from, have a duty to reclaim imagination as a means to investigate space. There is a mainstream narrative enforced on us and cultural resistance means spreading different perspectives, different flavours, through the world. It’s about spreading chaotic content that doesn’t exist within the confines of our language. It is a refusal of categorisation, of the limitations of language. We can expose these limitations through expression, including through music and noise. 

J.B. Why have you chosen to cast your own family’s heartbeats into space, especially because they’re attached to the Armenian diaspora and to the Armenian Genocide?

N.B.H.S. My family are survivors of the horrors of what humanity can achieve. The fact that they survived and that we can now hear their heartbeats extremely loudly from Piccadilly Circus is so powerful. It’s an assertion that people like me – also many of us, women, queer people – do exist and do survive.  

I also opened it up to the public because it’s not just about my family. Members of the public were invited to share their heartbeats, and we sent them to the moon and back. It’s not just one family, one story, because that goes against my ideas of making sure that there is a pluralistic use of the installation. 

Public Engagement and The Value of Public Art

J.B. What do you hope the public takes from Piccadilly Un:Plugged?

N.B.H.S. It’s about sparking an interest. In the middle of Piccadilly Circus, the public will see giant blobs and giant glowing cats. They’re going to have a conversation with the moon. These are weird experiences. On one level, I’d love the public to just take it in, go along with it and have fun with this weirdness.  

But I’d also love them to plunge into the content and start thinking about the futures of space exploration. I want them to start thinking of the cosmos as a space for their imaginations to exist. It’s an encouragement to go and do their own thing too – tell me what the cosmos should look like, tell me what your future should look like, how it interacts with the living environment.

Then I want them to communicate this vision of the future through creativity. I want them to blast it out into the world so that we can challenge the monolithic narrative we currently have on offer. 

J.B. While you have regularly engaged with the public – your Tour De Moon festival comes to mind – this is the most public of your projects to date. What is the value of public art? 


N.B.H.S. It’s one way to communicate some elements of the complexity at stake in a way that is accessible. That is powerful beyond any concept; the idea that you can be exposed to it and do whatever you want with it. It’s accessible and there for you to take on board. That is what public art should be. It should be all over buildings. Buildings shouldn’t exist without public art. We should support artists and creators because they are the ones that come up with the original visions for the future and they need to be celebrated. 

J.B. What’s next for you? 

N.B.H.S. I’m working on a new movie, Heartsnatcher. It’s a free interpretation of a 1953 book by Boris Vian. It’s the story of a turbulent mother and their relationship with the universe. It’s partly fiction, partly documentary. It’s about figuring out what comes after decolonial practices, once decolonization has taken place, once we have developed new visions and undergone an epistemic revolution that shifts our knowledge beyond the Industrial Revolution. Once we are in a post-human context, what is going to be the universal knowledge we’re going to build together?

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Doctor Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is an award-winning designer of experiences, filmmaker and creative disruptor known for ‘impossible’ productions with socio-political impact. Founder of the International Space Orchestra and the University of the Underground, she has collaborated with NASA, the UN, Massive Attack and Kid Cudi. Her latest film, Doppelgängers³ explores gender, history and free thinking in space.

Joshua Beutum