February 2014

Decartography

We have grown up in a culture that pursues advancement through maps, charts, and diagrams. We strive to understand, and to some extent control, the world around us. If we look deeply enough, we see the world pushing back. For our exhibit “Decartography” we look at our efforts to map the stars. Each culture has its own historical legends and sky-drawings. The big dipper has been a plough, it has been a coffin with mourners, it has been a great many things. It was not until 1930 that the International Astronomical Union standardized the constellations into 88 puzzle-piece sections of sky. Although the constellations are now formed by astronomical borders rather than somewhat arbitrary lines connecting stars, when we look up at Orion we still see the hunter that the Greeks saw in the sky. What happens, though, if we move so far into the future that the constellations (as connected lines between stars) shift into something quite unrecognizable to us: where one of the Gemini twins has a neck so elongated that his head is now at his twin’s foot? Where once recognizable forms become abstract compositions? The world we know, that we might assume has always been roughly the same, continues shifting–completely undaunted by our attempts to describe it. For this exhibit, we start by looking at star charts and drawing the constellations as pictorial, linear connections between stars corresponding with the IAU constellation names. We also assign each constellation a unique color with Prismacolor color pencil. Next, using planetarium software, we shift these drawings 90,000 years into the future in a universe that is constantly moving and redraw these new forms. We see what has happened to our attempts to map the stars and what our familiar sky has become. We are, in a sense, mapping the inevitable unmapping of our designs.

Radio Sebastian is an artmaking collaboration between Corwin Levi and Yumiko Blackwell based in Washington, DC.

Visit the Radio Sebastian’s website at www.radiosebastian.com.