surface tracking

Surface Tracking is the first in a series of drawing and print works that examine the landscapes where encounters between astronomers and the stars take place.

The 12 hand drawn maps are aerial views of one of the most important observatories in India, the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope Array (GMRT) just outside the city of Pune. Of the thirty dishes,  fourteen are located more or less randomly in a compact central array in a region of about 1 sq km. The remaining sixteen dishes are spread out along the 3 arms of an approximately `Y’-shaped configuration over a much larger region.  Used by astronomers across the world, research at the facility includes determination of the epoch of galaxy formation in the universe, Pulsar research and the observation of different astronomical objects such as galaxies, supernovae, the sun and solar winds.

The telescope becomes an instrument of both fiction and fact, gazing up and out, transforming our imagination of remote objects as physical places in the imagination.  The watcher becomes the watched. The observer is now the observed.