Reclaiming the Night Sky

A participatory intervention that examines the internet as a physical, political, and cultural infrastructure, extending from submarine cables on the ocean floor to satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.

While the internet is commonly experienced through abstract symbols such as loading bars, Wi-Fi icons, or buffering screens, this project foregrounds its material reality: cables, landing stations, data centers, launch systems, and orbital objects distributed across land, sea, and space.

What appears weightless and immaterial is revealed as a dense, stratified system embedded in geography, history, and unequal power relations.

A publication accompanies the project and explores historical developments and contemporary case studies, tracing the evolution of global connectivity from early military and scientific networks such as ARPANET and SATNET to transatlantic fiber-optic cables and today’s orbital megaconstellations.

It examines how the internet’s infrastructures, though foundational to everyday life, remain largely hidden from public view—camouflaged as mundane architecture, buried beneath oceans, or dispersed across orbital space—while shaping access, control, and dependency on a planetary scale.

The publication situates these systems within longer histories of colonial expansion, technological power, and economic extraction, revealing how promises of universal connectivity often reproduce asymmetries between the Global North and Global South.

Finally, the project invites participants to draw and reinterpret the night sky. Using publicly available satellite data, contemporary satellites—such as those belonging to Starlink—are mapped alongside established stellar constellations at a specific moment in time.

Participants are encouraged to draw their own connections between these points, creating temporary constellations that merge historical astronomy with modern orbital infrastructure.

Through this collective act of drawing, the night sky is reclaimed as a space of imagination, participation, and shared authorship, emphasizing that the ordering of the heavens has never been fixed, but has always been cultural, contested, and subject to human interpretation.

Many thanks to the indiecon team for the invitation and generous support :)