Light Mattang, the Gaia celestial network

The 18th International Exhibition of Artistic Lights 2015 has been inaugurated in Turin, Italy, and among the new entries this year is the “Light Mattang, the Gaia celestial network ” in Piazza Castello.

The location of the work was chosen as the roof of Palazzo Madama in Piazza Castello (the historical heart of the city) was the place of the first Astronomical Observatory of Turin, whose origin dates back to1759 when King Victor Amadeus III of Savoy gave Giovanni Battista Beccaria the charge of determining the local meridian. Astronomical instruments used for these measurements became the first nucleus of the Observatory.

The Light Mattang was conceived by the artist Ugo Locatelli and Davide Groppi for lighting design (twice Golden Compass in 2014), under the scientific curatorship of Mariateresa Crosta – researcher at the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin (OATo) of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

The work is a luminous and minimalist reconstruction of an ancient Polynesian ‘mattang’, a bamboo map of waves, currents and winds that allowed ancient Polynesian mariners to navigate between distant islands. Such mattangs were used for thousands of years by the islanders to travel in the archipelago and for preserving collective knowledge, as they did not possess a written language, since they can be adapted after successive journeys and comparisons with other journeys. The original mattang on which the work is modelled is preserved in the British Museum in London.

The Light Mattang is a metaphor of open exploratory navigation that refers to the concept of relativistic mapping of our Galaxy currently taking place through the collection of starlight in space, 1.5 million km from Earth, by the revolutionary Gaia mission, launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency. Turin holds scientific leadership for the Italian participation of the data analysis of the Gaia mission, involving eight observatories INAF, and is the location of the only Italian node (out of 6 in Europe) dedicated to processing Gaia data, hosted at ALTEC Spa.

Gaia, in fact, brings to the fore the relativistic nature of astrometry and, for the first time, it will be able to redraw celestial cartography, shifting our perspective from which we observe the universe from a Euclidean geometry to a purely relativistic one.

The installation of the Light Mattang thus marks the International Year of Light and the centenary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, both characterizing aspects of the Gaia mission.

The interest in mattangs is due to them being a crossroads of relations between thought and image, an intertwining between art and science, a passage from the formal simplicity of the grid to the complexity and dynamism of the network.

In contrast with the current pervasive and disruptive technology, the minimal yet, at the same time, dense nature of these stick maps reveal “a poor and extraordinary technology” (Arne Naess, Norwegian philosopher deep ecology, 1973). Building mutable bamboo or light maps in order to orient ourselves in space-time beyond our own ‘island’, exploring existing and navigating into unknown and new lands, laying a bridge between us and the Universe, extracting sensory perspective from mental models of reality, are not cognitive processes with ends in themselves, but are vital and emotional needs inherent in the human being and, as such, found both in scientific research and artistic expression.

The work indicates the relation between the visible and invisible: the provisional diurnal secrecy is revealed at dusk from the brightness of the edges of the luminous tracks.

We acknowledge the Italian Space Agency (Gaia, Operational Phase, ASI 2014-025-P.I. Lattanzi) for financial support.

[Translation by Ronald Drimmel]