BAD STARS

Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made up of the heavy elements they distribute across the universe. BAD STARS considers disaster through the metaphor of those stars that have gone wrong—as events that cause unprecedented change from a once-stable structure, and influence a wider, interdependent network. Seeing warnings about past disasters as a way to bypass potential disasters of the future; and considering disaster as a series of linkages extending from the environmental, cultural, political, economic, and social, BAD STARS draws threads between these connections and wonders how they might be realigned in ways that will help to move beyond them. The project sees the framework of disaster as an active strategy that can aid in the shifts in perspective necessary to advance beyond the causes of disasters themselves. cbattle.com/bad-stars/