Picture the Sky: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries

In my practice-based artistic PhD project Picture the Sky: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries I explore depictions and investigations of space in the overlap of scientific, aesthetic, and speculative realms, in order to rethink well known histories of space travel, computation, art, and astronomy to nurture more complex historical and material textures. A central strand of the project is to consider the image as a tool to map and to speculate with. Via scientific solar photographs, historical spectrograms, speculative artistic celestographs, and computer-generated astronomical models, I investigate how visual perceptions of the cosmos have influenced our worldviews over the past centuries. I address how art and science function as categories and knowledge systems, but I operate in a space where the borders between art, science, and speculation overlap in fuzzy ways. Through making and reflecting upon images, I set the following questions in orbit: How can we become more attentive to the complexities of history if we look at the work and people that were omitted from traditional narratives of astronomy and space travel? How can we, through studies of their photography, coding, and weaving, conceive of new ways of thinking about relationships between art, craft, and science; between the analog and the digital? And how can we, through these images and objects that make the world visible in new ways, imagine different futures?

I examine these questions through three investigations that interweave historical references, artistic experiments, and new scientific studies:

I Moon Memory: Through the intricately woven copper threads that made up the Apollo 11 moon landing programming and through my own coding and weaving experiments, I present a lunar landing history that encompasses a wider range of actors than usual and explore the overlapping logics and narratives of looms and computers.

II Visible Invisible: I study the grainy surfaces of hundred-year-old photographs created by astronomical pioneers to examine human-machine interactions and mechanisms of visibility and invisibility. I dwell on the presence of ghosts in the machines and reflect on the ethereal aspects of image making.

III Particles and Planets: By bringing together an odd couple—a 19^th-century mystic and a contemporary astrophysicist—I come into physical contact with cosmic matter and draw connections across time to contaminate narrow categories of “Earth” and “sky,” “feminine” and “masculine,” “scientific” and “artistic,” “rational” and “speculative.”

The project culminates in an artist’s book, a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus which contains photographs, films, weavings, installations, and algorithm-based works, as well as a public commission at the Steno Diabetes Center, Aarhus University Hospital. It thus combines a production of artworks, a thinking through them, and a meta-reflection on what their materials and technologies signify (at different times).

The project was developed at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University, Denmark, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.