Martin Wattenberg's Stellar Cartography Jon Ippolito An unruly flock of stars swarms across the screen. As their orbit expands, the nebulous clusters of sparks cohere into slowly spinning spirals: the universe on a computer monitor. The year is 1983, and the luminous microcosm is a computer program developed by cutting-edge researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. As I watch, the astronomers tweak the cosmological equations encoded in the program, then cook up another universe and compare it to the vision telescopes provide of our own. A uniform gas? Turn down the expansion constant. Braided star-strands? Stir in more gravity. Globular clusters? Another dash of angular momentum, and finally familiar-looking galaxies wheel across the screen. Historian of science Peter Galison has documented the revolution wreaked by these cosmological chefs, who demonstrated to the chagrin of their old-school colleagues that computer simulations could be a new form of experimental science. Theorists, for their part, took this world-generating experimental apparatus and turned it into a meta-theory: they imagined a primal "quantum foam" at the beginning of time, teeming with embryonic universes on the verge of expanding. Each of the bubbles in this foam is a proto-world organized according to a different set of principles. A bubble with the right principles gets a shot at expanding into a full-blown universe; God sits back and waits for the pot to boil over. It's an unsettling feeling, knowing that other universes may be jostling ours in this primeval cappuccino, but we should be used to this feeling by now. In a single stroke a Polish canon by the name of Nicholas Copernicus kicked the center out of a geocentric cosmos, sending the ornate epicycles Ptolemy's orrery had accumulated over the course of fourteen centuries clattering to the ground. Over the succeeding centuries, astronomers have discovered lots of other potential centers: the local star group, our Milky Way galaxy, the Virgo galactic cluster. But the story was always the same: anytime they fixed on a potential cosmic center, it was unseated by a de-centered model that turned out more elegant than the centered one. The Java interface that artist Martin Wattenberg has designed for NASA's art collection is also de-centered--or, to put it more accurately, multi-centered. Visitors to the Web site can sort documentation of the artworks according to various organizing principles, from artist to subject to the first word of the title. Choosing a new principle re-organizes the universe in a transition that is as startling visually as the cosmological conjuring acts I witnessed at Harvard twenty years ago. The contortions Copernica undergoes in switching from one principle to another, like those of its scientific precursors, offer a deeper structural understanding than could any static map of its collection. Of course, Wattenberg aims only to picture a collection, while the Harvard programmers were hoping to simulate a cosmos; art has traditionally been content to represent, while science has aimed to predict. This difference in the scale of ambition is certainly reflected in the individual examples of the art represented in NASA's collection, from Martin Berkon's interpretation in oils of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere to Henk Pander's matter-of-fact rendition of NASA's "Solar Thermal Vacuum Chamber." But representation can go beyond the retinal, and artists outside of the documentary tradition represented by Berkon and Pander have periodically turned to the star-filled firmament to represent something that can't be seen--something too vast to comprehend in a glance. Van Gogh's 1889 Starry Night is no star chart, but a meditation on the hypnotic power of the heavens, a revelation of the slippery slope between the natural and supernatural. A century later, digital tools have enabled artists and their viewers to go from gaping at sublime vistas to navigating them. Four undergraduate years wasted on stellar dynamics and quantum field theory weren't sufficient to quell my enchantment with the night sky; Electric Sky, an interactive map of online culture I charted for the Guggenheim's CyberAtlas project in 1996, figured the collaborative networks of the adolescent Internet as constellations of artists, online spaces, and service providers. If Electric Sky is a static snapshot of cyberspace, Wattenberg's own forays into representing online culture have rendered the swift precession of the electrosphere in a more dynamic fashion. A 1999 Java applet, Starry Nights, lets the user add or rearrange stars to a cartoonish firmament, apparently based on van Gogh's eponym hanging in New York's Museum of Modern Art (although its electronic impasto owes a closer debt to Jackson Pollock's 1953 Ocean Greyness at the Guggenheim). Wattenberg revisited this metaphor in a 1999 collaboration with Mark Tribe and Alex Galloway. This Starrynight is a dynamic interface to an archive of electronic texts contributed by the members of the Rhizome.org online community. Each star represents a different text; the brightness of each star is a measure of how often it has been requested by online visitors. (It's as though the dustcovers of library books got shinier rather than duller when borrowers left their fingerprints on them.) Like its precursor, this Starrynight reverses the perspective of Electric Sky, gazing from the ground into the ether rather than looking down from the heavens onto the earth. Starrynight also features a dynamic method for "slicing the data": viewers who select a theme such as gender or virtual reality see a constellation linking all of the stars representing texts with that theme--a cartography of cyberspace that literally connects the dots of online culture. Like Copernica, StarryNight embodies Wattenberg's ideal of an interface "that combines reading and seeing in equal measure." Media theorist Lev Manovich has argued that databases are for the computer age what narrative was for the modern age: the dominant form of cultural expression. If so, Wattenberg's interfaces are the shape of things to come, for instead of grafting pre-conceived taxonomies onto his databases he often derives the interface from the database itself. Viewers who choose Copernica's "Make Your Own" button can discover new galaxies simply by trying an organizing principle no one has tried before--say, partitioning the texts according to whether they contain the word "Earth" (40 matches) versus "Mars" (15 matches). This is one case where too many cooks don't spoil the broth--they make it more interesting. For Manovich, one of the most important variabilities of new media is the proliferation of interfaces to the same database. While some designers are content to come up with a single usable interface, Wattenberg's versatile tools offer viewers the chance to create multiple visions of a single collection. In the final analysis, then, Copernica is its own sort of quantum foam; the contents of Wattenberg's cup will please some tastes more than others, but there's an undeniable thrill in stirring it up to make some fresh bubbles.

Related Links http://www.moma.org/docs/collection/paintsculpt/c58.htm Cyberatlas.guggenheim.org Bewitched.com Guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_1297.html Rhizome.org/starrynight Spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/Cosmo/MonkeyGod.pdf

About Jon Ippolito Jon Ippolito has created online artworks seen at the Walker Art Center and ZKM, curated exhibitions of video art and virtual reality at the Guggenheim, and published a regular column in ArtByte magazine. This essay is the first time his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics has been of any use in his professional life.