First quarter of the year is about to draw to a close.
Same old bad brain, well if it isn't me breaking my own heaart. I wish I just didn't feel or process things, I do [sic] the way I do.
"Hey Bird! I know the true name of god."
Without really thinking about it, I have started yelling this at wild animals that look at me. I think I say it because it's what I hear or feel when animals look at me. I'm curious if this is something I've seen in a film or picked up from somewhere, if feels affected, but I honestly cannot place it, or at least I cannot place it, to a place outside of me?
Do you suppose birds know about negative space and gaps and silences in the text? (This is kind of a joke about the QLD English syllabus in 2004)
Solving <Laceration Gravity?
An icon for the growing plurality of voices and perspectives? in STEM? In the world?
This is kind of the main ideaa I've been noodling with for a[nother] zine I want to eventually make about the star as symbol. Like it's definitely cool and interesting that stars are one of the constants in all representational art. Like celestial bodies are one of the first things we record, as culture, as people, we see them and we want to draw them! Currently there is a trend or movement or feature of a lot of indie art in the late 2010/early 2020s to include twinkles or sparkling ornamentation in illustrations. Ornamentation, of course, is hardly new, and neither are stars in art (the seven sisters babyyyyyyy), but the twinkle style is kind of evolving at the moment. With what I recognise as a recent spike in representing the star/twinkle as irregular or wobbly. This is also an evolving aesthetic in many areas of contemporary life, I see it especially clearly in jewelry design right now. Previously stars were represented as point lights, and then regular radial point lights, not exclusively but predominantly. I think that the transition from point lights to regular radial point lights is related to increased access to lenses and viewing apparatus. The anime style four point twinkle, made enormously famous by shows like Sailor Moon, rose to its huge cultural status in lockstep with the deluge of space images from the Hubble Space Telescope (and other contemporary terrestrial telescopes which also featured photographic artifacts or diffraction patterns derived from the four struts used to support the primary mirror), which of course impacted contemporary artists. We are already beginning to see the impact of the James Webb Space Telescope in contemporary art/fashion/popular aesthetic. However I place the emergence of the "wobbly star"TM not solely on the shoulders of JWST, but on the subsequent realisation that the change in the star pattern from HST to JWST, broke the spell of the four point star as a given, the four point diffraction pattern for the first time since We started receiving space photographs was recognised as an artifact not a natural aspect of stars. Astronomers and Physicists stayed knowing this, of course, but we needed the images to change to know this - maybe that's true for them too?
Any way, this change in the image then supposes a new series of questions for us.
Where is the image constructed?
The Star itself?
The collisions that create the photons?
The distance the light traverses?
The atmosphere it then travels through?
The increasing molecular density that filters it?
The lens that refocuses it?
And then the lens that refocuses that?
The housing of that lens, its shape, form and material?
The sensor/s that captures the light?
The codex used to record the data?
Or the codex that in turn decodes this data into an image?
The screen that projects it?
The printer that produces it?
The eye that captures that reflection?
Or the mind that understands it?
How many lens known and unknown does light pass through before we recognise it as an image?
The wobbly or irregular star, in some ways implicates the 'suture lines' of the optical nerve, that to each person create a unique diffraction pattern, in each eye separately. It implicates the messiness of receiving an image, the unusually unique circumstances of receiving an image. I like to think of it as a sign or symbol of the beginning of understanding the necessity and value of diversity in STEM (maybe, at least I hope it is) and maybestars more broadly just in people. I think the wobbly star comes very specifically out of this moment, from modernity and identity politics and anime and space telescopes and instagram and printers and physicists, and that's all very exciting. I like when society sublimates a thing happening in many places into an aesthetic and a symbol. That stars can be so many things to so many people, points, like a star in many directions. To our diversity, but also to our sameness. That we all look up.
