Deep Future: Star Charts for the next 100,000 years
Tellart X Droog
Imagine standing on the North Pole looking up at the night sky on New Year's Eve this year, and every ten thousand years, for the next hundred thousand years. The celestial sphere changes—constellations of stars distort.
Inspired by this effect and our ongoing futures foresight research, we created Deep Future.
Deep Future was an installation at Droog Amsterdam that celebrated Tellart's 15th anniversary, mixing traditional analog crafts with a drawing robot and data visualizations of the celestial sphere through the next hundred thousand years.
Our custom beeswax-printing robot drew 10,000 year intervals of future star charts on cotton, which was then dyed using traditional indigo dye process. These scarves were sold onsite at Droog to benefit Voedselbank, Amsterdam's food bank.
The dotted lines on the interface visualize the pattern printer head's movement.
The beeswax printer was assembled using a repurposed X-Y plotter mechanism, a batik wax pen and 3D printed parts.
The beeswax printer was assembled using a repurposed X-Y plotter mechanism, a batik wax pen and 3D printed parts.
“We wanted to create a set of poetic images that would reveal this ethereality of things that we assume to be permanent, and underline our interest in uncertainty, the future, and the importance of people being able to question it, negotiate it, and navigate it with some resources and information.”
Matt Cottam, Tellart Founder, in Creators (Vice)
“The exhibition goes straight into the Museum's central proposal, which is to show the possible ‘tomorrows’ of our planet, which are not static. In the case of constellations, they move all the time.”
Leonardo Menezes, Manager of Exhibitions at the Museu do Amanhã
Project Data
Highlights:
• The star charts were featured in a special exhibition at the Museu do Amanhã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from January to May 2017.
Selected Press:
Project team:
Tellart created the concept, custom software and robotics. The star charts were dyed with the help of Blueprint Amsterdam. The exhibition was held at Hotel Droog in Amsterdam, and later at Museu do Amanhã in Rio de Janeiro.
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