“Constellations” is one section of the Chengdu Biennale themed “Time Gravity”. It easily reminds people of a space high-speed Internet plan launched by the space service company SpaceX: the Starlink plan. It is said that the network it builds not only far exceeds the performance and coverage of traditional satellite Internet, but also is not restricted by ground signal transmission stations. It can provide high-speed Internet services for areas that have not yet been connected to the ground network system and break regional monopolies. Linking and breaking, networking and shielding are also one of the issues involved in this section. It has gradually become a theme of our time: island chainization, anti-globalization, and re-globalization.
The name of this section “Constellations” is the plural form of “constellation”. Since ancient times, peo- ple have been interested in the arrangement of stars and naturally linked some nearby stars to corre- spond to characters or instruments in their myths in an image-based way. These imagined star groups are called “constellations”.
Although in the three-dimensional universe, the stars in each constellation may not actually have any actual relationship with each other, and they may even be far apart from each other, their visual posi- tions are very close when viewed from the Earth. This also constitutes a parallax of viewing and cog- nition. In pre-modern times without satellite positioning, people used this parallax to determine and memorize the orientation of the sky and find where they are during navigation.
Constellations not only have positioning functions, but many are also part of the sky we imagine cul- turally. Different civilizations have completely different divisions and names for constellations. In 1930, in order to unify the complicated constellation divisions, the International Astronomical Union divided the sky into eighty-eight official constellations based on the ancient Greek traditional constellations handed down from medieval Western times. Most stars in the sky have a certain international unified position. In contrast, some widely circulated constellation divisions in non-Western cultures have grad- ually been obscured and forgotten or preserved as local cultural memories, such as the “Big Dipper” familiar to Chinese people. Cultural discussions on differences in star connection methods also trigger rethinking about globalization and localization relationships. It echoes our transition from singularity to diversity in a new era.
In short, “Constellations” is a metaphor for linking. Each participating artwork tells its own story. When they gather at the Chengdu Biennale in a new cultural field, they will form new networks and constitute new matrices to regain meaning and form multiple readings and understandings between the global and local.