Once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place,
it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real
than their referents; of becoming in fact, part of the scenery.

Simon Schama

Deep Time is part of an ongoing project that looks to map common points between astronomy and art practice, through the lens of metaphor. The works are explorations of strange terrains where myth and fiction blur the boundaries of what is real and imagined. When trying to imagine the unimaginable, we are forced to rely on our powers of projection; we must recycle past impressions and memories, projecting them onto the strange in order to render them conceivable.

Five years ago, I began a project that looked at unraveling the hidden world of amateur astronomers in Delhi. Beginning as a form of collective investigation, stories, conversations, and histories came together in a slowly building chronicle of this almost obsessive group of people whose lives have been transformed by the night sky. As an amateur astronomer and an artist, this was also an exercise in self-reflexivity. Where did I position myself within the material? Or perhaps, where did astronomy position itself within my practice? As part of the research, I traveled back and forth across the country with amateur astronomers, each trip focused on a stellar event or site. All these trips were extraordinary: these sites, hidden away from most civilization, far from any towns and villages, were almost symbolic of the individuals drawn to them.

Why do amateur astronomers do what they do? What do these groups of people, enthralled by the night sky, tell us about the nature and complexities of human meaning-making in the age of the Anthropocene? How do we construct our environment and how does that environment in turn construct us? Amateur astronomy is as much about an encounter with the self as it is an experience of space and horizon.

As this work has developed, I have become increasingly conscious of the methods of “field work” and “expedition” in my practice. These modes have been particularly useful in the observation and exploration of the relationships between the human and nonhuman, “natural” and “technological,” where intersecting patterns between the two are made visible. How has our experience of wonder changed? Whereas once the sublime resided in spaces devoid of human encroachment, might we now say that it is equally those spaces where (through technology) we try to understand our connection to planet Earth: sites of extraordinary strangeness; astronomical, archaeological.

The sky is ambiguous. It represents a blank canvas, a surface onto which individual desires, thoughts, and feelings can be mapped and projected. Both cosmology and fiction share a quest for pattern and meaning. In both cases, we could also say that it is the viewer/reader, who, as an active agent, completes its meaning through interpretation. *Atmospheres* offers an alternate perspective on the iconic photograph of the Blue Planet as seen from space which, at the end of the 1960s, replaced the mushroom cloud as the global icon of the postwar period and the Cold War. The view of Earth from outer space was an event of historical importance. It transformed our consciousness and made us think about the Earth’s ecosystem as a single planetary unit. Our present as well ‒ both the climate debate and the Anthropocene concept show this ‒ is shaped by a notion of “one planet.” In the work, we see the Earth from our own perspective on the ground. The sky becomes a mirror. With the camera lens pointed at the zenith, we see shifting frames of sky and cloud, crisscrossed by thin black lines, the beautiful and strange decametre-wave radio telescope at the Gauribidanur Observatory near Bangalore in India.

Helio Blue is both a color and the sum of its parts. *Helio*, the Sun, or in this case the radio-heliograph that captures two-dimensional images of the solar corona at different frequencies, against *Blue*, the sky, as it gradually shifts from white to black through fifty-two shades of blue; a re-imagining of the Cyanometer an eighteenth-century instrument for measuring the “blueness,” specifically the color intensity of sky-blue.