ODI's Data as Culture Programme
4-channel digital film, 28 minutes with sound.
Commissioned by Data as Culture at the ODI as part of an Evidence & Foresight online artists’ residency.
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.
The artwork is accessible to all by appointment during office hours, Monday to Friday, from Friday 6 May 2022.
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4-channel digital film with sound
One Hundred Thousand Suns
From 6 May 2022 at the Open Data Institute
Causal, Closed, Environmental, Geospatial, Identifiable, Live, Metadata, Open, Processed, Retrieved, Shared, Static, Temporal, Unknown
Rohini Devasher is an artist and amateur astronomer. Between 2021 and 2022 Rohini was Online Artist-in-Residence at the ODI as part of the Evidence and Foresight programme and created, her major new four-channel film installation One Hundred Thousand Suns.