Luna 2017 Custom real-time software Variable dimensions

Made In collaboration with Jen Lowe

FRM Logo

My first child was a toddler when we lived in Brooklyn. Every night we read Goodnight Moon together: its quiet room, its red balloon, its painted moon. For a toddler, the picture of the moon and the moon are the same thing. The moon existed in that book before it existed in the sky.

So I built a window that could always find it.

LUNA is a real-time portrait of the moon, accurate to the current hour: its phase, its illumination, the slow rotation of its face, the atmosphere around it shifting from day to night. Housed in a frame made from an old monitor, a Raspberry Pi, and wood, it is a domestic object that behaves like a window pointed perpetually at the sky, regardless of where you hang it or what the clouds are doing outside.

What it does is simple. It tells you how the moon looks right now. But what it asks is different: to notice the moon, to pay attention to their changing phases, their rhythms and motion, and how that change relates to your life whether or not you looked at it. LUNA does not simulate or approximate. It's a token of attention. A reminder of the moon's presence, that it exists.

That shift, from the moon in the book to the moon as a present, living thing, is what the work is after. Not information. Awareness.

LUNA was the beginning of a ten-year process of learning to calculate the motion of stars, satellites, and planets. That study became Hypatia, an astronomical computation library that now underlies ESTRELLAS (2018), Orbitas (2018), Weaver (2026), and Astros (2026). The same thread runs through all of them, an invitation to expand awareness toward what's happening at a scale just beyond ordinary attention. It begins here: in a frame of wood and old hardware, hung on a wall in Brooklyn, showing a child the moon that was always there.

slide slide slide slide slide

Related Works

Astros 2026 Generative real-time software Variable dimensions
BLINK 2023 Real-time Generative Art Variable dimensions
Hogar 2019 Custom real-time software Variable dimensions
Órbitas 2018 Custom real-time software Variable dimensions
Estrellas 2018 Custom real-time software Variable dimensions