Brittany Nelson’s filmic and photographic exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center takes the unlikely setting of a radio astronomy observatory and treats it as an emotional landscape. The new work, made at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, looks at how instruments designed to listen for distant signals end up absorbing human projections of hope, fixation, and frustration. Trained as a photographer, she works with early analog processes—tintype, bromoil, gelatin silver—bringing a tactile, slightly unstable quality to images of a facility built for precision. That friction carries into Rebecca (2026), a new moving-image work that subtly draws on the gothic thrill of Daphne du Maurier’s novel and Hitchcock’s film of the same name. The telescope becomes a charged presence whose mechanical hum is woven into an uneasy soundtrack. But Nelson refuses to romanticize either science or longing; throughout, she frames the search for extraterrestrial contact as a facsimile of desire and existentialism.