The 'Verse

What it is

The ’Verse is a star chart arranged around the zodiac so it’s also a calendar. I made it with materials that could look like they came from any century since the written word. I wanted it to have both a past and a futurey vibe.

What it means to me

Technically it’s art, so you can throw any old meaning at it, but here we go… Every human who ever lived a full life wondered at those same stars, wondered at strange transcendent things, and tried to make sense of it all with diagrams and constellations and myth. So in one sense it’s a connection to all those people, that sense of wonder, and a feeling shared across millennia.

In another sense, the materials are old but the polygon globe implies futurey things and imposing order on the universe, so it’s a link to what’s coming. I’ve always looked up at the stars and seen decoration, sure, but more than that they’re a promise, a challenge. One day we’re going up there and we’ll bring star charts of our own. Before we could write we made these things to navigate the land and the seas, and then it’ll be the black itself.

How it went

For a project I thought I could get done in a week, a few months might have been a bit of a left hook.

From picking a terrible method of mapping the constellations (stitching together a bunch of screenshots from an online planetarium, stellarium-web.org), to skipping the check that the constellations actually aligned on pentagons that weren’t already touching. Re-drilling those really cost me some time, but it did earn me an amazing demerit badge that you can buy from Adam Savage’s store. Then there was the hand-cramping sewing of the constellations themselves!

I’ve gained an amazing amount of appreciation for carpenters, embroiderers and sign writers. I started this project to use some tools I wasn’t 100% used to and expand my itty-bitty horizons, and I’ve loved and hated every minute of it.