Galileo Project

Starting off as an art teacher, Galileo began his career by becoming a master in understanding how to look at things. He was an observational artist and taught his students how dimension, shadow, and perspective worked. This vast knowledge of space and how we see it aided him in understanding outer space and our solar system. Although Galileo did not invent the telescope, he revolutionized it by turning it to the sky and realizing that the lenses needed to be curved in order to see with maximum strength. He sanded the lens down to do so and was able to make some of the first observations about our solar system, which were immensely accurate and amazing discoveries for this time. He realized, purely based on his observations of the night sky, that the moon had phases. He also realized that Jupiter had moons and that other plants had phases. By observing these things over time, Galileo was able to deduce that the earth was not in fact at the center of our galaxy, it was most likely the sun. This he proposed a heliocentric understanding of the universe, where it had been previously thought as geocentric, which meant everything revolved around the earth. The Catholic Church, however, was not fond of this idea because it meant gods creation was not the center of the universe and assigned Galileo to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Despite this, he continued to make amazing observations along with Kepler, another scientist at the time. The two exchanged coded messages about their work and observations, very tediously because scientific journals did not exist at the time and all of their information was private and sacred. What they discovered was amazing but there have been leaps and bounds in understanding the Galaxy we live in and the vastness of the universe. I greatly appreciated the knowledge that Galileo provided but was also very interested in what he couldn't see and understand. There are so many dimensions to the universe that are incomprehensible to any human and just simply too vast to understand. In my project, I wanted to convey this hidden knowledge in conjunction with what we can observe to create a slightly abstracted representation of the confusion of the observable universe and how we try to understand it. I was immediately drawn to constellations because of their interesting history and ties to Greek mythology. There are 88 variations of constellations broken down into 12 different groups. I have chosen a random representative from each group and abstracted the shape slightly, but allowed the viewer to understand that they are stars by the white paper and rays of light emanating from them. I have taken these constellations and layered them among twelve hexagons, which if arranged with each side touching would create a three dimensional enclosed shape of a dodecagon. This enclosed object would represent the understandable universe but I have broken it down to different plains of existence in which each constellation resides, however I have overlapped them to show the difficult in understanding the dimensions in which they exist. They overlap and interact and are hard to understand, just like the universe we live in.