ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a body of artists’ techniques for cosmological representation. It focuses on experimental film-maker Jordan Belson’s radiating astronomical imagery in films such as Allures, Samadhi and Momentum that grew out of the Vortex concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco in the 1950s. In the European Renaissance, entire architectures became apparatuses for projecting the sun and allowing a solar image to form. In 1475 the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli placed a bronze ring with an aperture in the window in the cupola of the Duomo in Florence. The electromagnetic frequencies from the sun that drive Hinterding’s sound composition are produced by the same type of radiation as ultraviolet light revealed by the hydrogen alpha telescope, although with differences in wavelength and frequency. In the Earthstar installation, custom-made radio antennae wrapped with coils of copper wire capture the electromagnetic energies of the sun.
