Looking to the South (crux)

This is a handmade piece imitating my cellphone’s size and shape. This piece is made on a perforated inox plate and textured by hole patterns. As a sort of “stencil” of the sky, backlighting this piece reveals some open holes, shaping the exact proportions of the constellation Cruz del Sur (Crux) and its adjacent part of the sky. This constellation is only visible from the planet’s southern hemisphere, and sailors used it as a navigator’s compass, indicating the south pole.

A “piece of sky” is synthesised and changed into a “binary” operation, in which the sealed holes keep the silence of the night depths while the perforations refer us to the vibrant light of the stars. This interplay of open and closed elements alludes to the nature of the binary code, which logic programmers use as a form of architecture to create and structure spaces of human encounters and interactions on the web.

I did this work in the desert of Atacama (Chile) and sent it to Berlin (Germany). It must obey a condition to keep its function: To remain in the planet’s Northern hemisphere.