This practice-based artistic research project
Picture the Sky: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries explores 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 func-
tion as categories and knowledge systems, but I operate in a space where
the borders between art, science, and speculation overlap in fuzzy ways.
Theoretically, the project combines new materialist thinking (Bennett, Marks,
Monteiro, Plant), with theories of media ecology and media archeology (Full-
er, Parikka, Galloway, Rahm and Skågeby), feminist science and technol-
ogy studies (Haraway, Hayles, Barad, van der Tuin, Le Guin, Zylinska) and
glitch feminism (Laboria Cuboniks, Russel, Menkman).
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 narra-
tives 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 his-
torical 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 19th-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 a dissertation in the form of 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. The project thus
combines a production of artworks, a thinking through them, and a meta-re-
flection on what their materials and technologies signify (at different times).