A Curious Blueprint of the Skies: Exploring reciprocity between orbital and terrestrial space.

Abstract

A Curious Blueprint of the Skies explores reciprocity between orbital and terrestrial space. Through drawing, animation and Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) imaging, it considers space infrastructure as productive and destructive, with satellites simultaneously generate and contaminate planetary knowledge. The work unfolds through a dialogue between human and machine interpretation, digital and analogue expression, and past and present perspectives.

Beginning at SpaceX’s rocket launch site adjacent to the protected habitat of shorebirds, it magnifies the link between local environmental damage and the global expansion of satellite mega-constellations. These networks carry historical resonances of early maps of Mars that echo the current ubiquity of observation and surveillance of our own planet. This exploration continues through the transmission and decoding of satellite imagery of both Earth and Mars, enacted through a drawing process first carried out by NASA scientists in 1964 to reveal the first flyby image of Mars, and replicated by Raupach in 2024 to decode satellite data received directly from NOAA weather satellites.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) imaging is used to synthesise these drawings into 3D representations, incorporating the digital artifacts of misinterpreted data as visual anomalies evocative of space debris in orbit. The same technique documents landscapes engineered to calibrate aerial photography, considering how the physical world is reconfigured into code for interpretation by technologies out of view. Through animation of sun-synchronous orbital paths and the circular geometry of satellite mega-constellation ‘orbital shells’, the piece concludes with an open-ended question of how space infrastructure shapes more-than-human ecosystems in reciprocal, unruly, and unknowable ways. Show more