ASTRA

ASTRA is an installation that files the sky. A DUX television from about 1957, a rotary telephone dial and a computer that carries the mathematics of the heavens inside it — no feed, no network. It recomputes the true positions of the Sun, Moon and planets every sixty seconds from the Swiss Ephemeris, the dataset planetariums use. The moon waxing on the screen is waxing above the building.

You dial a date of birth, eight digits, then dial again for the matter: work, love, or the other thing. The archive compares the sky of that day with the sky overhead now and reports where the two touch. Every sentence was written in advance — composed in collaboration with an artificial intelligence during the making of the work, then edited and curated by hand. Nothing generates at the moment of consultation; the machine selects and assembles. Your date is used for one computation and then forgotten. The archive keeps files on the sky, not on you.

Artist: KidButton. The librarian’s corpus was written in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic), edited and curated by the artist.