SOME ASTRONOMERS KEPT A DISTANCE
Curated by: Alejandro Alonso Diaz
Artists: David Ferrando Giraut, Andrea Zucchini
May 2016
Some astronomers kept a distance is a self-contained intervention by artists Andrea Zuchini and David Ferrando Giraut. In the context of Salón, the installation unfolds as a total environment examining the tautologies of potential universes, whether real or fictitious, and the impact they might have on human behaviour.
In his 1584 ground-breaking work ‘’On the Infinite Number of Possible Worlds’’, Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer Giordano Bruno went even further in his cosmological speculation than the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their own exoplanets and raised the possibility that these planets could even foster life of their own. He also insisted that the universe is in fact infinite and could have no celestial body at its "center. He saw that our sun was not only not the center, but that it orbited in a galaxy and that that was not the end of the story. There could be no end.
While stating his visionary theories, Bruno also explored notions of non-objective thinking such as magic. Magic, which is generally understood, as the mastery over the physical, spiritual and divine forces in the world is under Giordano’s light a quasi-empirical phenomenon. His notion of the magic is far from an irrational comprehension of the natural and he rather identifies it as the ability to perceive or recognize the set of natural relationships that arise within the realm of the fantastic. That is, that magical practices are based on his previously developed theory of the links. Thus, the magician must pay strong attention to the fields of the imagination, as imagination is the gateway to all the affections with the potential to affect living beings.
In order to achieve this linkage there are three basic factors:
- Active power of the agent.
- Passive power of the subject (a disposition or aptitude of non-resistance).
- The appropriate circumstances of time and space.
The links are never eternal because they occur in a moving world, so not all of them can link to something under the same circumstances.
According to Bruno there exist three entrances in order to develop these links:
- Eyesight, through the appropriate forms and gestures.
- Sound: through voices and speeches.
- The mind/imagination.
Those links are established through the senses. From the first contact when they are perceived; then the marriage, that is when it begins to develop a sense of the things that came via the senses, and finally the link when attraction takes place. Therefore the manipulator must be aware at all times that in order to attract one or more individuals, should consider the full range of interests subject to bewitch. For this reason, any sort of rational or irrational speculation requires having a more than partial knowledge of the subject, as otherwise the link wouldn’t take place.
Bruno’s speculative theories respond to the three levels of reality in his ontological states: the divine world and the physical world are connected through fantasy; so magic is nevertheless, the middle step in the process from sensitivity to cognition. In a similar way, Some astronomers kept a distance takes the viewer on an erratic spatial tour through the limits of physics and rationality. Through an environment where inanimate items and animate representations exist on the same level with neither of these categorically different species taking the upper hand, the project is a exploratory journey into our human share in the world which is made visible by confronting us with the most primary limits of the human comprehension.
