Light Echoes and Standard Stars are immersive media artworks that celebrate the women ‘star measurers’ who worked on the Astrographic Catalogue in the 19th and 20th century. A workforce of women were employed to work as human computers on the Astrographic Catalogue at Sydney, Melbourne and Perth observatories between 1890 and 1964. Their work in measuring the positions of stars was a major contribution to this international scientific endeavour and is under-acknowledged in published documentation.
Light Echoes transcribes signatures found in hundreds of logbooks held in the MAAS collection, at Sydney Observatory, and in the NSW Archives into an augmented reality sky space. The research for this work involved cross-checking data to match up the signatures to the corresponding photographic plates and using this new data to build a virtual sky map that embeds the women’s re-animated hand-drawn signatures into the astronomical coordinates of the stars they mapped.
Standard Stars is a series of motorised, rotating mirrors laser-etched with log book notations that allude to the social and technological influences on the women’s lives. When lit, the mirrors are reflected onto the surrounding walls in a projection caused by the absence of material that form the laser-etched handwritten marks.
The Astrographic Catalogue logbooks offer insight into both social and scientific systems that shifted in astronomy with the rise of photography in the late 19th century. Light Echoes and Standard Stares evoke the confluence of human labour and machine automation as technological change materialised through the hands and minds of women who worked, invisibly, during this time.
Light Echoes Unity Developer: Peter Hayman.
Supported by a Research Fellowship with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2019, and the ANU Gender Institute.
Light Echoes, 2023, VR artwork with spatialised sound by Dr Diana Chester. Developer: Peter Hayman.
Light Echoes, 2024, VR artwork with spatialised sound by Dr Diana Chester, projected at Mt Stromlo Observatory, Canberra..
Standard Stars, 2021 (work in progress), laser-etched mirrors, LED lights, dimensions variable.