Coming to a momentary standstill around a lunar standstill

Dear interlocutor,

I'm hoping that, if you're in the Northern hemisphere, you're able to slow down a bit as we move towards the last full moon of the year and the upcoming winter solstice. And if you're in the Southern hemisphere, perhaps you're enjoying the increasing length of the days as you move towards summer solstice. In either case, soon the directions will change—in one case, days getting longer, in another, days getting shorter—a sure sign of the dynamics of the cycles on this here Earth.

And in this vein I'm writing my last newsletter for 2024, as a kind of wrap-up of the last few weeks of extreme business. As I've talked with my other freelancer artist friends over the past few years, we always find these last months of the year to be supremely busy. It's almost as if, after the slowdown of the summer months (here in the north at least), we try and pack as much as possible into the remaining weeks of the year. Hurry up hurry up hurry up! and then relaaaaax over the holiday period. Perhaps we could do something about this by having, I don't know, universal basic income to enable us to work at a more even pace. Oh well, a girl can dream, can't she?

In any event, here's a bit of what's happened the past few weeks—that is, reporting on some of the events that I wrote about in the last newsletter. And I've got some exciting news to share about the coming year, along with some thoughts and links to things to watch or read as you (hopefully) catch a few moments of rest.

I had hoped this newsletter would be short, but, somehow, it's longer than the last one. Oops. Feel free to skim. If you just want to jump ahead to some recommendations I have for things to read or watch, you can click here.

Past

Improper Walls, Vienna

I was delighted to be able to install three works (TX-1, DEAR INTERLOCUTOR: TX-1, and a new print—more on that below) at Improper Walls as part of the exhibition "They say identity: We say multitude". Many thanks to daniela and Ale and everyone else there who helped me with the install. The show is up until 22 January.

W139, Amsterdam

TX-2: MOONSHADOW was installed at W139 in Amsterdam as part of the exhibition "Taking Root Among the Stars" initiated by Müge Yılmaz and Anna Hoetjes. Again, many thanks to the team there for going up on very tall scaffolding to install MOONSHADOW. I think this is the highest the piece has ever been hung, and I'm extremely happy with how it looks and reflects the light in the space. The show is up until 2 February.

Frankfurt, Giessen

My workshop, "Orienting for Transitioning Times", took place in Frankfurt as part of the "Reading the Earth and Stars: Field methods for Narrating Geological & Cosmic Time" event organised by Lukáš Likavčan and Aisling O'Carroll. Here I talked about the history and practice of astrolabes—about how they are a cosmological calculator, can tell you when the sun will rise or set on any date of the year, tell you how the stars will move throughout the night, and will help you do fixed-star astrology (and how astrology and astronomy are fundamentally linked). We then learned, on paper versions of astrolabes, how to do these calculations. In addition, we went on a trip to a far away place—a trip that I'm not going to say much about in this newsletter. If you (or someone you know) is interested in hosting a workshop like this sometime in 2025, please let me know.

Stroom, Den Haag

Finally, for my last public event of the year, I was able to be part of "Not Rocket Science" at Stroom in Den Haag, curated by Lua Vollaard. I indulged in a lecture-performance that incorporated some research I've been doing about the occult history of American rocketry (via Jack Parsons and his connections to Aleister Crowley), alongside some of my contemporary work done in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this past summer with artists and instrument designers interested in space and extraterrestrial phenomena. I was delighted to involve one of my main collaborators there, Venzha Christ, remotely, and to use one of the satellite dish instruments I made in Indonesia with mas Nanang Garuda. Like the workshop I just described, I'd also be glad to share this lecture-performance in other contexts, so please reach out if you're interested.

De-install, Raven Row, London

And I just arrived back from de-installing TX-2: MOONSHADOW at Raven Row in London. Usually I wouldn't talk about deinstalls in a newsletter, but I want to highlight Raven Row for being one of the most amazing places an artist can work with. The care and attention and conversation I've been able to have with everyone at Raven Row over the past year or so has been incredible. I wish every place were like this and I hope every artist gets to work with a place like Raven Row at some point in their career.

Upcoming

Tabakalera, Donostia/San Sebastián

Cryptically alluded to via an epistolary note in the last newsletter, I am working on a new piece, Quantal Chamber that will be exhibited as part of a traveling show in 2025-2026 entitled "Quantum Visions". The first installment (of three) of this will take place at Tabakalera in Donostia/San Sebastián, opening on 20 February 2025. (Future installments will happen at HEK in Basel and MU in Eindhoven.) Quantal Chamber vibrates with the noise of quantum computers and will take form as a sculptural and multi-sensory installation. For such a seemingly "hi-tech" topic I am trying to make my work as "analogue" as possible...although I don't really believe there is a harsh boundary between the digital and the analogue. Quantal Chamber will develop over the course of the three exhibitions, so what will be exhibited in Tabakalera will not exactly be what is exhibited in HEK or MU.

I'm extremely grateful to Angelique Spaninks from MU who has graciously commissioned this work, and as well to another funder, with I will turn to now...…

Funding

Stimuleringfonds

Just before I got on the train to Den Haag for the event at Stroom (mentioned above), I got an e-mail from Stimuleringsfonds that my grant for the "Internationalization Grant Scheme" was funded for Quantal Chamber. This means I will be able to do a lot more work with other partners in different countries over the coming year for this project, and most definitely makes the financing of Quantal Chamber much easier. I'm very grateful to Stimuleringsfonds for their support.

Mondriaan Fonds

I was extremely happy to also receive a "Voucher Development" grant from Mondriaan Fonds earlier in the fall to pay for some new equipment in the studio: a CNC router for working with wood and metal, an FDM 3D printer, a scroll saw, and a drill press (still to be purchased). These tools will help me more easily (and cheaply) prototype works, and have already come in handy. I'm definitely looking forward to some interesting experiments with these tools, especially with the CNC. More to come....

Prints

One of the other piece of equipment I bought this fall was an idraw H A3 drawing robot. I've been wanting something like this for a while, and this seemed the best one to buy for many reasons^[1]. I have a lot of plans for this in the future but have already tested it out with some prints connected to a side-project of mine.

I'm exploring how the night sky would look around exoplanets—because of parallax, it would be extremely different from what we experience here on Earth. And, depending on how far away we would be, we'd also be able to see a small yellow-orange star in the night sky: Sol, our Sun. We're now able to simulate, with high accuracy, what these night skies look like because of orbiting observatories like the Gaia spacecraft, which is still functioning in orbit having taken astrometric observations for over 1 billion objects so far. By knowing how far away stars are from our perspective here on earth, we can then create 3D models of the cosmos which allows us to shift our perspective to a new star system. Software like Celestia can pull in data from Gaia to therefore display what the night sky would look like very far away from earth.

So for one of my first printing projects with the new drawing robot I've been plotting the night sky around the exoplanet Proxima Centauri B, around 4,25 light years away. I've taken the positions and approximate sizes of around 1000 stars and hand arranged them according to their appropriate positions in the night sky, there. Of course in this plot is also Sol, a small, relatively standard star that would not stand out particularly in the sky. Nevertheless, for any humans who traveled there, it would perhaps be one of the most important dots they look up to at night. I wonder what it would feel like to see it so small, to see the stars in such a different arrangement. How would we relate to such an alien—such a xeno—feeling? (Ahh, you thought I could write a newsletter without using the word xeno? Not a chance.) Given the immense role the night sky has played in human (and non-human) life here on earth, it's sometimes perplexing how little of a role the xeno night sky plays in our imaginaries of life elsewhere.

In any event, my first print has the following poetic title, definitely inspired by the story-titles of Kara Walker: A VIEW OF SOL FROM PROXIMA CENTAURI B, J2000.0 EPOCH//DEAREST—//BATHED IN THE UNQUENCHABLE FIRE OF//THE NEW SUN, I YEARN FOR//THE RAYS SHED BY//THE XANTHIC PIN-PRICK//I LEFT SO LONG AGO.//WAS IT FOGGY TODAY?//THE SKY HERE DISORIENTS://SOL A MOTE,//THE GUIDE STAR//NO LONGER TRUSTWORTHY.//FALLIABLE PATHS,//YET THE FOOL DEMANDS WE TAKE A STEP://TODAY FOR ME,//YEARS AGO FOR YOU.

I'm experimenting with different ways of showing and plotting these prints, one of which is now on view at the Improper Walls show in Vienna. But I currently have some A3, A5, and 20cm square prints available, if anyone is interested. Note that these are not editioned prints: I do plan on making this a series in the coming years, with proper editioning, but I still have some tests to do before that happens^[2]. If you do want some prints now, they'll definitely be offered for less than when I offer them as an edition.

And there will be of course more kinds of prints to be made from this plotter as well as from the CNC, but you'll all have to wait for the new year to see what arises.

Some notes and reading/watching thoughts

Just a few notes that may be of interest to many or to few of you:

• Major lunar standstill, 15 December. For those of you not as attuned to the skies as I am, we are going through what are known as the major lunar standstills, this year and next. A lunar standstill is when the moon rises and sets at its furthest northern or southern positions along the horizon (major lunar standstill), or, alternatively, when it rises and sets within its most narrow range of positions along the horizon (minor lunar standstill). (Things are reversed for the southern hemisphere. You can read on Wikipedia more information about the standstills, why they occur, and the extreme details of how this all functions. Trust me: it's a bit complex) These standstills only occur every 18.6 years, so they're a pretty major yet infrequent event. Nevertheless, there is now ample evidence that our long-ago kin took note of these standstills (especially the major ones) and, perhaps, even designed elements of paleolithic and neolithic sites around the standstills. I've been reading this page of people involved in archaeoastronomy who are researching this using contemporary simulation tools and observations. And there is even growing evidence that certain alignments of stones at Stonehenge were connected to these standstills. If you live in the northern hemisphere, and especially if you are in high northern latitudes, be sure to look up on the night of the full moon around midnight to see just how high the moon is in the night sky.
• If you're in London, please try and see "Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet" at the Tate Modern. We can quibble with some of the curatorial decisions (and omissions), but to see so many kinetic light works from the 1950s and 1960s, working, is not only a treat but also a technical feat deserving of kudos. I especially adored Otto Piene's Light Room (Jena), which had me in awe and made me feel things I rarely do in museums.

• While at Tate Modern, I was overjoyed to see a copy of Ecoes #6, the journal from Sonic Acts Press that has some fragments from my "Fragments of Xenology" in it. I can now cross off "have writing in the Tate Modern bookstore" off my list. (Note: I do not have a list with "Have writing in the Tate Modern bookstore" on it. :) )
• In my research for the Quantal Chamber project I learned that the errors in quantum computers are contextual, meaning that they depend on not only what happens around individual qubits in the circuit, but also what happens before in a sequence of gates. In a certain sense, this is obvious from a quantum perspective, but it's certainly not something we usually think about with so-called "classical" computers—you don't expect that the error in a transistor will depend on what happened in the past of that particular transistor. But this exactly what happens with qubits. For the technical details, see this talk.
• If you would like to watch a decent fictionalization of the Jack Parsons/occult/rocketry story, take a look at the series "Strange Angel" from a couple of years ago. Easy to binge over the holiday season.
• Heard this track on an NTS stream I was listening to, said to myself, that sounds magical, checked on the singer, and indeed it was Elizabeth Fraser. Divine music as always from her.
• Here's a very long article (that has a gotten a lot of traffic) about why the newest social media darling on the block, Bluesky, is not really decentralized, but also what federated systems like Mastodon need to do to become better themselves: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/. This is without even getting to the fact that Bluesky has some rather shady funding going on, and has, well, been dealing with some concerns by trans people about the directions that it's going in in terms of moderation and account suspensions.
• Even with those concerns, I've been moving most of my social media posting to both Mastodon and Bluesky, and will be phasing out the use of Facebook and Instagram. You can follow me on Mastodon @zeitkunst@post.lurk.org and on Bluesky @zeitkunst.bsky.social. Of course the best way to remain informed is through this newsletter :) Please share with others who might be interested!

A sign-off for the year

I have not written in this newsletter so far about the elephant in the US-sized room, which is, well, a certain person returning to the US presidency. For those of you who don't know, I am a life-long pacifist, and thus I find most of the actions of both Republicans and Democrats—particularly in terms of foreign policy outside of the US borders—to be abhorrent. (And well, what they do within the US isn't often good either.) Nevertheless the damage that the next administration will do to trans rights in the US—and by extension, the world, due to US hegemony—is beyond the pale. It is a not an exaggeration to say that the next administration will try and make it impossible to be trans in public in the US. These actions have consequences as they directly influence other strong-men tactics elsewhere in the world. I fear for what will come...not only because of this, but of course also because of the crushing waves of destruction that have been unleashed by the US.

I have to have hope, nonetheless. No matter how utopian or idealistic it might seem in the face of such pain. I try, in the few short years I have on this planet, to delineate a different way of living, thinking, doing, and making. And I hope the small ripples I make can constructively interfere with the ripples you, and others, make, to eventually shift us to a new trajectory.

I recently read the following paragraphs by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in a chapter entitled "Survival Radio". It's from a collection called Poetry as Spellcasting edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White (and purchased from the treasure-of-a-store Treadwell's in London). They resonated with me—and I mean that literally, as I also do a lot of work with radio and radio transmission as an artform—and perhaps they will for you as well. They relate to Gumbs' engagement with the work of Audrey Lourde and some extremely difficult times in Lourde's life. These lines take the long view, but in this long view they also highlight what we can do now:

Radio waves will be here long after we are gone.
In phases, everything we built to support our lives will crumble. Nature will reclaim what we are currently stealing. Plants and animals or whatever organisms survive and emerge out of our changes to the climate will vine through and grow and propagate like what we see happening now in the empty-of-people (but not empty at all) city of Chernobyl. Or at least that’s what Alan Weisman says in The World Without Us, which tracks what would happen on this planet if humans completely disappeared.
But the radio waves. They will continue to move out into the expanding universe, unbound by the lost infrastructure of cities and the towers that were once their relay stations—far into space, until they are drowned out by the louder cosmic noise of—what? The next universe creating itself? What can receive all that afterlife of vibration as vibration? Someone trying to say something. A voice longing over longer and longer distances to be heard.

Sound those voices, even if they may not be heard now. There will be beings sometime, somewhere, to hear them. All they need is the right antenna, the right orientation, the right phasing, to tune in.

Amidst the dark of the northern winter, light a fire to illuminate the dark. See how the dark and light intertwine and interpenetrate, flittering in and out of existence. Make your way through this spectrum in the best way you know how.

With that, I wish you all a blessed Yule and turning of the calendrical year.

In anticipation of what comes next,

Adriana

1. For the nerdy ones: this plotter is all one piece, bolted together, which makes everything extremely rigid and unlikely to move around. As well, the plate on which the paper sits is bolted to the machine, so there's no chance of it moving around in relation to the arms. In short, it's always guaranteed to be square, which means the only degrees of freedom are in how you hold your paper to the plate and the orientation of the pen. ↩︎
2. I'm using Fabriano Black Black paper, which is indeed such a deep, beautiful, black, although I wish the paper were a bit more toothy. Currently I'm also using a Signo pastel gel white pen, which works, but is not quite as small and sharp-edged as I would like. I have some opaque white fountain pen ink that I'm going to be testing soon, so we'll see how well that works—hopefully the stars can be a bit more pin-prick-like, which would really convey what I'm trying to get at with the piece. I also got some vintage Rotring Rapidograph technical pens that, if I can make them work without destroying them, will afford me some extremely precise control of the plotting. ↩︎