Subtract the Sky is built conceptually and practically around the structure of a database generated through collaboration, deriving both its functionality and its aesthetics from this structure and process. A Collaborative System frames a field of potential for human/machine interaction, which challenges accepted models of authorship and necessitates a rethinking of aesthetics. This suggests the possibility of an aesthetics of "Database."

Database aesthetics is not located in the interpretation of beauty in a static form. It incorporates contradiction; it is simultaneously recombinant and indexical, precise and scaleable, immersive and emergent, homogeneous and heterogeneous. It is a field of coherence and contradiction. The aesthetics of database arise when the participant, (whom we call mapper), interacts within and traverses this field. As the mapper's contributions are incorporated, the content and structure of that field are transformed, thus constituting the "art object" as a continuously evolving and fluid "archive." The collaborative frames of Subtract the Sky are Archive /Map/Site.

The Archive is a depository of information in all dimensions. It emerges into meaning as mappers trace unique patterns of interconnections. The Archive has the following components

Subtract the Sky consists of three interfaces which allow mappers to build maps real, metaphoric, or however conceptualized, and participate in a community of Cartographers. The ArchiveSearch will allow mappers to search for previous map-makers, to view not only their maps, but also the genealogy of the selected maps, and to use those maps as raw material for their own. The DatabaseSearch will allow mappers to search the entire database independently of the archive of mapper-indexed maps. The MapMaker interface will be something like a combination of photoshop/word/soundedit/minicad that includes access to the archive and database. The site will essentially be an evolving, self-generating, relational database as users add maps and/or data to its archive.

The Map has the following structure:

Based on the premise that the "public" should have access to large scale publicly funded science and technology programs that impact our conceptual, social and physical lives so dramatically, we've chosen the areas of astronomy/biology/geography research as social/bio-body sites which users of Subtract the Sky may deterritorialize. The other public site we will engage is the public school system, taken as a channel of dissemination outside of the gallery/museum system, which will reach a very wide audience. We feel strongly that this is one of the "publics" that should have access to science research, a pubic given only limited access to scientific knowledge, and as we know all to well, virtually no exposure to art. Youth cultures are sites potentially receptive to and able to carry forward cultural change. By using art to frame and contest the dominant hold science has on public and private life, we hope to bring science to accountability, while raising art to a more prominent position in the public imaginary. Since science funding sources that use public moneys have grant programs specifically for educational outreach, we plan to tap those sources for project support. For instance, we are applying for funds through NASA’s IDEAS educational outreach program. We plan to work with such organizations as American Association of Physic Teachers to give Subtract the Sky an institutional public school presence nationwide.

The Site, then, has the following locations:

The Astronomy Site:

We have begun development of the Keck site; development of the other two will occur in phases two and three. We are in the process of installing two robotically mounted webcams in one of the Keck domes, and one outside situated between both domes. The cameras will be accessible from Subtract the Sky, allowing visitors to see the Telescope during the day from high visibility perspectives. Future plans include sound feed from the observatory to Subtract the Sky, allowing communication with observatory staff and scientists. The outside camera will observe the domes rotating, the shutters opening and closing with view into domes, and the landscape of Mauna Kea. Subtract the Sky will link to the Keck web site, and maintain an active interaction with Keck observation schedule and events.

The Keck Observatory exemplifies the kind of situated complexity Subtract the Sky will engage. Keck's summit consists of what is called the Science Preserve, an almost 12,000 acre plot that literally rings Mauna Kea's peak. On 600 acres of this sit 20 observatories. In other areas of the Preserve, and between the altitudes of 9000 and 13,000 feet encircling Mauna Kea, are over 4000 shrines sacred to native Hawaiian families. In the late 60's University of Hawaii and the State Bureau of Land Management were given a 65 year lease with the charge to maintain both the environmental and cultural integrity of the summit, and that a maximum of 8 observatories be built. Last year, the Hawaii State legislature order an audit of their management practices. The report was damning. In apparent defiance, the response to the audit is to expand the current 20 observatories to a total of 54. The response at public hearings has been complete outrage. Native Hawaiian Sovereignty representatives, scientists, environmentalists, legal firms, non-native residents, observatory staff in some cases, have joined in protest. Issues of science (both western and indigenous), land rights, environment, religion, politics, economics, etc. all collide here.

Subtract the Sky is about giving voice to this type of complexity, aiming to be interventionist, but from a complexly layered, multiaxial view. We work with Puragra Guhathakurta, an astrophysicist affiliated with UCSC who works with the Keck and the Hubble Telescope. His research and educational interests are central to the cartographic, epistemological and aesthetic aspects of the project, and will begin to seed the database. In phase two and three, we will engage a biologist and a geographer. Subtract the Sky offers the mediating tool of cartography as a site where activist art can seriously intervene in some of today's most pressing issues: environment, science, indigenism, culture at large. We will develop analogous connections to the other science-sites as well, and with the same intent.

We've chosen cartography as the site's main form of collaboration because it conflates the fictional and the real, the concepts of space-time and their relative scales, and because maps represent everything from nationalism, to battles over land and resource rights, to dreaming the Law in Australia in the form of a painting now locked in a vault that has the status of a deed, to the star charts and wooden tools used by Polynesian navigators, to genetic mapping, to genealogy maps, to ancient constellations and their mythologies, etc. Implicit in Subtract the Sky's database is a juxtaposition of indigenous and western paradigms of epistemologies in every sense -- scientific, aesthetic, historical, political, erotic, etc.....

Subtract the Sky is about locating oneself. We locate ourselves in part in astrophysics because its ideas require that we step outside common sense representations of spacetime. We frame the way we work in the astronomical sense of "deep" that assumes only relative frames of reference all coevolving as a collaborative system with no center. Subtract the Sky takes its x/y coordinates to be aesthetics and politics. But it sets these axes in motion in fields of users each of whom navigate by uniquely scaled coordinate systems of their own. Astrophysics is the physical frame in which we look for origins and others. Subtract the Sky is about relocating oneself.