This multimedia exhibition presents artworks from numerous artists that explore how celestial bodies and past cosmological events relate to today's digital era. The CAMLab presents a series of multimedia artworks, including video, performance, and installation. This group exhibition brings together an international group of artists who explore how cultures have seen and measured the universe in different ways through immersive art installations.
The show includes Amélie Bouvier's Eight Minutes Ago, 2019. Bouvier created this two-channel projected artwork from her own visit the to the Harvard Plate Stacks, as well as other imagery of her own drawings, dust, and a transcript of her own father’s memories of his then ninety-three year long life. The piece's duration, as well as the title, references the time it takes for a photon of light to travel from the sun to our own eyes. Bouvier includes both imagery of annotated plates, coupled with the DASCH project's destructive process of erasing annotations from most plates in the Harvard Plate Stacks. She melds both imagery and sound to highlight the fragility of the human existence, especially when compared to the vast scale and time of the Universe. The artwork questions what we remember, what we save, and how perspective shifts this all from one person’s lifetime to that of the Universe’s existence.
The exhibition also includes three loaned photographic facsimiles of plates from the Harvard Plate Stacks. These analog copies, made from original objects in our collection, let gallery visitors the opportunity to see the material nature of glass plate negatives, as well as the opportunity to see the resolution of the astronomical data they can capture, and the importance of their historical annotations on them. The facsimiles on view are from Plate KA01146, which Bouvier artwork shows being scraped of its annotations. This is paired with two facsimiles from the Fleming Collection, which preserves 679 plates with their annotations to this day, including MC07247, with annotations like those made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt of the North Polar Sequence. This plate has clusters of annotations pointing out barely perceptible stars captured on the plates; thus, the annotations are easier to see than the celestial data they record. Finally, a reproduction of MC27537 shows the amazing marking of Muriel Mussells Seyfert and the hundreds of galaxies she discovered on one plate. The numerous annotations filling the plate match the density of stellar and galactic light captured on the original negative.
The exhibition also includes artworks by Zhanyi Chen, Rohini Devasher, Behnaz Farahi, Maria Takeuchi, Jiayue Cecilia Wu, and Yufeng Zhao. Visit the website to learn more about the other artworks in the show.
The exhibition is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Hours: Friday–Sunday, 11:00 AM–4:00 PM ET
LOCATION:CAMLab FAS Harvard STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20261107T190000Z DTEND:20261121T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR