Celestial Conversations

Artificial satellites around the Earth are a new form of light pollution. Those on low-earth orbits can be especially bright. Companies plan to launch tens of thousands of such satellites, and our view of the night sky, constellations and the Milky Way may be entirely lost.

As of 2024, there are more than 14,000 satellites and about 120 million pieces of debris in Earth orbit, of which only a few of the larger pieces can be tracked. 

Under this changing night sky, our group wanted to address the following questions:

• How will we perceive:

How does a night sky filled with satellites and man-made objects may deceive our perception of the natural and the technological? 

• How will we adapt:

If satellites change the composition of the night sky, will humans need to use exo-aesthetic modes of thinking to adapt?

• How will culture shift:

Could the integration of human-made objects into celestial narratives lead to reimagining character archetypes, blending mythology with technology; and how might this impact cultural and psychological frameworks tied to identity and self-perception?

To address these questions, we made Celestial Conversations, a multilingual, artistic, exo-aesthetic response to the pollution of night sky through satellites.

The climate crisis is a highly complex, intertwined problem, that will require an exo-aesthetic solution outside of pre-existing frameworks of human knowledge. Art has a unique capacity to provoke ineffable points of entry and thus solutions to climate change and the night skies, yet is often neglected in the academic conversation around satellite pollution. 

Another element that was integral to our approach was that the publication is in English, Spanish, and Chinese. As a multi-lingual collective, we wanted to produce a multi-lingual response that can then be distributed across our respective home communities. We are interested in this project as a global response to climate change. It is a challenge that all of humanity must consider and address collectively. Furthermore, when we return to our home cities, we will all be under the same night sky. 

The zine covers everything from visual response to storytelling to design and sonic interventions. Given the range of approaches each artist brought to the project, the zine has a wide range of potential access points for the viewer. Our hope is that anyone, regardless of background, could pick up the zine and find some entry point that speaks to them, guiding them on a reflection of how the night skies are changing and what this means about larger, interconnected issues of the human relationship to Earth. Rather than presenting statistics that can feel overwhelming or inaccessible, we hope that the range of media inside the zine will open up the possibilities through which one could interact with the topic of satellite pollution, raising overall awareness on the topic.