Uranometria revisited

The online work Uranometria, which brings together images, a video and texts, was put together in 2013 and is based upon an installation which I was commissioned to do as part of a group exhibit that took place in 2011 in the Second Life region Aire Ville Spatiale, which is sponsored by the French National Costume Museum in Moulins, France. The event was curated by Marc Blieux (avatar name: Marc Moana) and was projected into the physical exhibition space of the museum as part of an exhibit on virtual art. The show was developed around the concept of synchronicity, which also gave the Real Life show its name: SynchroniCity. Beyond this exhibition I have also used Uranometria as one of 3 exemplars in a paper on three dimensional typography and aleatoric texts written for the Cyberworlds 2012 conference, and presented at the Fraunhofer Institute, Darmstadt in September 2012. Uranometria brings together two unrelated subjects: Excerpts from Carl Jung’s introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching and the astronomical maps from Johan Bayer’s Uranometria, which is the first Western celestial atlas, created in 1603. Although the Age of the Enlightenment was still centuries away, I think that Uranometria is an early harbinger of it, presaging a mindset which is grounded in causality and reason. And then I am also thinking of the whole nature of western astrology with its mechanistic, clockwork universe in which the rigidly structured and predetermined sojourn of the planets chart out seemingly immutable patterns of influence upon human life - which is so very different from the fluid, ever changing universe of the I Ching which instigated Jung to coin the term ‘synchronicity.’ Visitors of the installation can become a part of it by putting on a custom designed avatar costume which dresses them up as Uranometric zodiac signs that are held captive by their star bound fate which is represented by the similarly attired and caged humanoid objects that revolve around them. In their vicinity however Jung’s words float and twirl, tossed hither and thither by virtual winds. Given that I have used huge chunks out of Jung’s foreword, the text used on these huge panels is not aleatoric in nature in and of itself. Nevertheless the layering and overlapping which comes about due to the fact that all of the type is displayed at an equal size, and placed upon transparent backgrounds does provide for a certain amount of chance encounters: Since different parts of the treatise continuously come together and float apart, ever novel configurations of readings (as well as non-readings) of it can be gleaned from the emerging typographic construct in which sequence and hierarchy changes depending upon where the 3D viewpoint is located. For more information, images and links to a video, please view the online project page here: http://alphaauer-uranometria.blogspot.com/