The ancient Babylonians were far in advance of most other civilizations 3,000 years ago when it came to their comprehension of the heavens above. Their studies of celestial movement led them to develop a table, known as an Ephemeris, that recorded the exact coordinates of the stars and the five known planets that fueled their mythology of gods and goddesses. Several of these tables survive to this day as cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets. What is most fascinating out of the creation of the Ephemeris, is how it mirrored the way other civilizations found it important to create a map of the stars, and chose to preserve such information.
My work is a personal take on how the ancient Babylonians might have imagined the three closest planets that they observed in the celestial body above them; Nabu (Mercury), Ishtar (Venus), Nergal (Mars). Arranged like a model of the solar system in an orrery, the viewer becomes immersed within the work, and is invited to explore the surfaces of distorted terrain and traversed paths.
A highly respected and influential astronomer by the name of Percival Lowell, published his observations of Mars in the early 1900’s. From his books he propagated the existence of ‘canals’ on the surface of the red planet, unbeknownst to him that he was merely connecting lines and imaginary dots due to spherical aberrations in the glass lenses of his telescope. He had a direct influence on science fiction writers who continued the imagination of Martian engineers on Mars because he stated the canals existence as fact, until later disproven when in the 1960’s the first Mars probes showed that they weren’t there. Lenses carved onto the surface serve as the vehicle to emulate the spherical aberrations drawn from the surface imagery of the glass planetary form, to spark curiosity.