At night, I can’t see any stars because of the light pollution. All celestial bodies are satellites in this artificial night.
Since the beginning of human history, people have looked to the sky for orientation: to navigate on Earth and in the universe through cycles of time; developing maps, calendars, and systems of meaning-making based on celestial patterns. Stars long relied on for orientation are obscured by the stronger lights of human made satellites. How is the ancient technology of astrology affected by artificial satellites? How can we read the stars if we’re blinded by satellites? What new information is there to interpret? What if zodiacs are based on the number of satellites and their positions at the time of birth? Fake Astrology speculates on (im)possible futures imagined, mediated, interpreted and manifested by technology, asking how the methods we use for divination shape the worlds we imagine.
Fake Astrology is an ongoing research made through various formats: satellite gazing, birth chart readings mapping historical data, and the Fake Astrology oracle deck. Thinking-with the satellites we’ve launched into orbit, Fake Astrology considers how our economic, ecological and political decisions materially alter outer space, recognizing that social issues are no longer earthbound. The universe doesn’t only influence us; we also influence the universe. Our agency is not only planetary—but celestial. As a perpetuation of the cold war, satellites continue to be inseparable from systems of power and control, capitalism, militarism and colonialism, a constant reminder of our own destructive force and self-destructive potential. Fake Astrology is the study of artificial satellites in an artificial night, their astrological impact and interference.
If astrology is a system of orientation, Fake Astrology orbits about disorientation: an interfering astrology that stirs up the systems that organize our techno-capitalist era and the ways we orient and move inside it. Fake Astrology is a disorientation device for a world made up of artificial darkness, synthetic bodies, impossible futures and man-made techno-divinities. Practicing Fake Astrology begins with unlearning, including ways to practice automatic processes such as perception, attention, and interpretation differently. Fake Astrology is a means to put our imagination to work, a way to practice imagination as an act of resistance in a time where the future becomes all the more abstracted and impossible to imagine otherwise. Fake Astrology is an ecology of practices, a compound of knowledges, methods and sensitivities developed through dance into a generative tool to make us think, feel and work differently.
Concept: Gry Tingskog
Developed through ongoing collaborations with: Lim Mui, Lu Chieregati and Anna Lublina
Supported by: Konstnärsnämnden/Swedish Art Grants Committee, K3 Tanzplan Hamburg
