Coming down next (or: a Reverse Astronomy study)

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Telescope, indian ink, paper, digital print
2016

The artwork has its roots within the standard concept of astronomy: looking from earth outwards. If we imagine and map the universe we see as a sphere, we find Earth (our only point from where we observe the sky) at the center having coordinates 0°0’0”.
For this work I reversed the optical tube of a telescope and I provided it with a ‘drawing arm’.
As the telescope’s motor rotates (by being programmed to track the movement of specific stars in the sky), the arm draws their ‘negative’ paths on the ground. After several different paths have been drawn I scanned the lines of ink, zoomed in the image
and reprinted them. The final result is a catalog of observations that resemble astronomical objects. The micro merges with the macro.
This work tries to mirror the standard concept of astronomy by looking from somewhere else towards earth. The project reverses the point from where we look by moving it out to a fixed point in outer space: Earth becomes the subject of a multilayered observation with its new coordinates and a new ‘ground-chart’.