A Day’s Work, drawing, video, 2003

Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander’s Atlas des Nördlichen Gesternten Himmels (Atlas of the Northern Starry Sky, 1863) is the companion to the catalogue known as the Bonner Durchmusterung, a sky survey undertaken by Argelander and his assistants in 1852. The survey recorded the position and estimated visual magnitude of 324,198 stars visible with the 78mm Bonn telescope. This information was inscribed in an atlas of forty sheets. An austere monument to sytematised knowledge, Argelander’s engraved atlas renounced nearly all the conventions of the tradition to which it belongs and displays a nakedly disorganised cosmos.

An ordinary day in the studio. A table is spread with a sheet from the atlas, a worker is engaged in systematically erasing all the data on the map. Noises off.

work: Mo-Ling Chui