Field Ground

Patricia Satterlee has been exploring ideas about representation and observation since the 2001. The result is the formulation of "field ground" as an analytical framework.

Observation

Personal Geometry — a tool to aid in representing the wider range of observation

Field Ground

Essential features

Utility

I was intrigued by a recent story about the ALMA observatory in Peru specifically when the project director mentioned that the Incas charted star-to-star constellations but they also charted "dark cloud" constellations. The anthropologist Gary Urton characterizes the dark constellations as symbolically representing a transitional, intermediate category of celestial phenomena. "That is they are androgynous or asexual, and even though they are located in the sky, they are classified as pachatierra (or pachatira), a word which combines the Quechua and the Spanish terms for earth." (Urton, At the Crossroads... 109). This kind of intermingling of experiences, contexts, and meanings, of earth on heaven and existence in nothingness resonates with the way I approach my work.

http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/andes/inca.nightsky.html