Post-global art

Jem Finer has meshed together the three spheres of the world wide web, the night sky and the earth.

He has found a website for every star : a website that names someone, somewhere or something on earth that shares or contains the name of the star.

You can find the links to these websites in 'On earth as it is in heaven', which provides access via his old readers digest atlas to a set of world maps: one global double page spread per constellation.

Each star in the consellation is plotted onto the atlas at the point of the earth where the person/thing/place that shares its name is located. Click on the star and the link takes you to the website that identified it. All the stars joined up by lines which make a new earthly shape for the constellation.

The picture above is the map for the constellation Orion . I was hoping that Jem would have found something about Betalgeuse in Guildford (where Arthur Dent thought that Ford Prefect came from). But instead the point is situated in New York, home of the Betalgeuse film and TV production company.

Stars, earthly towns and cities, websites, : lasting for billions of years, hundreds of years, years. When we come to map them we only have our human recognition of shape, our shared myths, and our understanding of words with which to map them with.

We have nothing anywhere near as potent and user friendly as the constellations with which to navigate our way around the world wide web.