SCOPE - Space Craft Oracle for Personal Enlightenment

Astrology, one of the earliest sciences, interpreted astronomical constellations to predict futures. Despite being deemed a pseudoscience, horoscopes remain popular. However, the sky has changed significantly in the last 60 years, now hosting over 3000 satellites, space probes and tens of thousands of debris particles. These man-made objects, like distant celestial bodies, impact human destinies, influencing our daily lives through (satellite) technology.

The artwork proposes a new divinatory science for the upcoming technoscene, utilizing all historical satellite and space craft launches as the basis for personal birth charts. Connected to various databases, the system selects the launches around the respective birthday and feeds the associated mission metadata to an artificial intelligence generating the horoscope texts depending on the space craft’s characteristics, printed directly for the visitor to take home.
Merging objective data with subjective truths, this results in a unique work of hyper-speculative satellite astrology, born from human longing for meaning and our deeply rooted desire to imprint our existence onto the world around us. We have created a new sky. Now the sky recreates us.

Produced by funds of Le Pavillon Namur, Stiftung Kunstfond, Brandenburger Arbeitsstipendium and Berliner Recherchestipendium.

Based on data from Jonathan’s Space Report & Gunters Space Page amongst others.