The video work “Orbits” is based on the live performance of the same name. It shows man-made objects in space and depicts their orbits as a kind of poetic dance of satellites and their debris. Seemingly chaotic traces mutate into seemingly organic patterns due to the laws of physics. The artist collective Quadrature works with official satellite data and, because of its incompleteness, with data from amateur astronomers observing the night sky. The video, which combines both sources, strikes a balance between artistic autonomy and scientific rigor. It is an aesthetic encounter that calculates the orbits of some 17,000 objects and reveals a hidden layer of human infrastructure.
This project is co-funded by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT, in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union under the S+T+ARTS programme’s Regional STARTS Centers.