Light Echoes is an immersive media artwork that celebrate the women ‘star measurers’ who worked on the Astrographic Catalogue, the international scientific endeavour to map the sky in the 19th and 20th century. Originally developed as a VR or AR experience, Light Echoes has been reimagined as large-scale architectual projection onto Sydney Observatory (Powerhouse Museum Up Late, Winter Solstice, 2023) and Mount Stromlo Observatory (Enlighten Festival, 2024), with sound by Dr. Diana Chester.

Between 1890 and 1964, a workforce of women were employed to work as human computers on the Astrographic Catalogue at Sydney, Melbourne and Perth observatories. Their work in measuring the positions of stars was a major contribution that is under-acknowledged in published documentation of the catalogue.

Light Echoes transcribes signatures found in hundreds of logbooks held in the MAAS collection, at Sydney Observatory, and in the NSW Archives into a virtual reality sky space. The research for this work involved cross-checking data to match up the signatures to the corresponding photographic plates and using this new data to build a virtual sky map that embeds the women’s re-animated hand-drawn signatures into the astronomical coordinates of the stars they mapped.

The Astrographic Catalogue logbooks offer insight into both social and scientific systems that shifted in astronomy with the rise of photography in the late 19th century. Light Echoes evokes the confluence of human labour and machine automation as technological change materialised through the hands and minds of women who worked, invisibly, during this time.

Sound: Dr Diana Chester
Unity Developer: Peter Hayman.

Supported by a Research Fellowship with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2019, and the ANU Gender Institute.