Commissioned by Data as Culture at the ODI as part of an Evidence & Foresight online artists’ residency.
4-channel digital film, 28 minutes with sound.
The work consists of 4 ‘paradigms’ explored through separate digital channels showing simultaneously over four large screens.
Paradigm 1: Sun Drawings explores the notion of observation over time using naked-eye drawings of the solar disk created between 1902 and 1904. It explores the nature of drawing when faced with an object that is not only unfamiliar but one which is in most cases difficult to understand, see and draw.
Paradigm 2: Twin Suns considers the Sun as both knowable and unknowable. It focuses on the collections of lost, never to be repeated moments, captured using 19th century glass plate photography. Devasher has layered these moments with carbon paper drawings on copper sheets. She says: “Most copper on Earth was forged in very massive stars. These supergiant stars later exploded as supernovae, catapulting the newly minted copper into space.”
Paradigm 3: Site features the instruments and people at the historical Kodaikanal Observatory, some of whom have been observing the Sun for four generations.
Paradigm 4: Eclipse offers a meditation on the light from our Sun caught in the beam of the 60-metre tunnel telescope at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory. The voices of data of eclipse chasers who devote their lives to standing in the shadow of the Moon form the soundtrack.
Each paradigm within One Hundred Thousand Suns also contains a specific acoustic rendering of the sun, using data, voice, music and sound.
Rohini Devasher says: “Much of my work looks at the role of ‘observation’ and the ‘field’ or ‘site’. But I had never previously thought of myself as working with data. The ODI has helped me recognise that data is how we observe what we care about. It can be a mirror. It is not a natural phenomenon. I wanted to make a work that pushes slightly against the idea of data as detached, disinterested or neutral. What’s most exciting is the data created not by a single person but through collaborative effort.”
How do we know our nearest star? Inspired by the concept of digital twinning models, Rohini Devasher has created a series of ‘analogue Sun twins’. One Hundred Thousand Suns takes us on a journey through the vast amounts of data held at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in India. The Kodaikanal Observatory is one of only two observatories in the world that has over 120 years of data about the Sun and its influence on Earth and space. Drawing on archives of over 157,000 images, along with observations, interviews with eclipse chasers and eclipse data she collected herself in 2009, 2019 and 2021, Rohini explores the relationships between observation and experience, and information, data and truth.
Photographs of drawings of the solar disk and images of glass photographic plates held at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory reproduced here with permission and courtesy of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics Archives, Bangalore.
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