Please refer to Kurt Vanhoutte, in: Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance:

Deep Time of the Theatre, Nele Wynants (ed.), Palgrave Macmilan, 2019.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319995755

Chapter 7

Performing Astronomy: The Orrery as Model, Theatre and Experience

Kurt Vanhoutte

Astronomical

In 2011, artist and former documentary photographer Mishka Henner published twelve
five-hundred page volumes under the title Astronomical. The width of each page
represents a distance of one million kilometres. Starting with our Sun, which spans a
double page, Henner’s first volume continues with page after page of the blackest black
until the reader hits upon the tiny spot that is Mercury. The Earth and everything we
hold dear is a speck on page 155. Eventually, after having passed Mars, there are 220
pages of the Asteroid Belt. Jupiter is to be found in volume two, Saturn in volume three
and on page 6000 is Pluto. Each planet is positioned on the right-hand page of its spread
as if it were illuminated by the Sun of the first page of volume one. The book contains
an index to the planets, yet the black pages are not numbered. Astronomical is a
conflicted attempt to depict the scale of the solar system of which we are part. Leafing
through the twelve volumes somehow makes palpable our unfathomable position in the
universe. The impact of the work startled even the artist, “Like most of my projects, I
made a book, produced a video trailer, published it on my website and got on with the
next project. But this video went viral and before long, goths and emos remixed the
trailer to celebrate its accurate depiction of their lives, astronomers and scientists were
discussing the book’s accuracy and function (…)” (Himes and Swanson 2011, 202).
Astronomical is an orrery, albeit a remarkably uncommon one, as it represents
the distance of the planets from the Sun on flat paper. In its most usual form, an orrery
is a clockwork mechanism with balls of various sizes attached to copper arms made to
scale that illustrate the relative positions of the celestial bodies. Also generically known
as a “planetarium”, it was a very popular amusement and teaching device, and was
much in vogue during the Enlightenment. It was used as an aid to demonstrate the new
heliocentric universe promoted by the protagonists of the Scientific Revolution. After
centuries of dogmatic belief that the Earth was the static and privileged centre of the
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universe, these devices shook the notion that man was at the middle of it all. In the
nineteenth century no progressive household was without this captivating dynamic
desktop theatre of the planets. To judge from the response to Henner’s orrery, its
popularity has waned little since. What aligns his Astronomical with the long history
of the mechanical orrery is of course the astronomical interest that sparked both, as
well as a particular blend of awe and wonder caused by the invitation of the design to
revisit our position in the universe. In the past, turning the handle to make the earth,
and perhaps other planets, orbit the Sun made the European imagination recalibrate to
a greater here and a longer now. The sizes of and the distances between the planets
were necessarily inaccurate, but the orrery was nevertheless imbued with a sublime
sense of cosmological time and space. From the start, this clockwork device subverted
the mind with the extreme contradictions between the experience of the individual
position and a view that was above it all. It made people flipflop between the view from
the earth we stand on and the god-like celestial viewpoint. The visual-tactile effect still
reverberates in the sheer materiality of Henner’s volumes, the turning of the pages, the
folding of the universe into yesteryear’s medium of knowledge transfer par excellence.
Astronomical demonstrates that the profound effect of the orrery persists over
time even when its shape and design radically changes. The power to transform and
still retain its initial impact is an indicative of its prototypical character. To the extent
that the orrery manifests itself throughout cultural history, where it signals both cultural
continuities and ruptures, it can be called a “topos”. Influenced by the pioneering work
of Ernst Robert Curtius, media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo considers “topoi” to be
clusters of interconnected trains of thought that form recurrent expressions (Erkki
Huhtamo 2011). To understand the internal dynamics of old and new media, topos
study focuses on the discursive space where technologies are imagined and talked
about. For all its simplicity – and because of its simplicity – the orrery, then, can be
said to articulate recurring and existential questions that derive their substance from the
human sense of place and perspective. Discoveries and inventions in the field of optics
and astronomy has in particular left us with three major interrelated questions, all of
which lie at the heart of visual culture and cognition. How can we accurately see distant
and moving objects and measure the scale of the universe we are in? How can we
distinguish between our own motion and the motions we are observing? And how can
we relativize our own centrality from which we view our self and the world, when by
definition our visual cognition places us in the middle of things? The orrery is a

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persistent cultural formula that highlights these fundamental questions about

perception and point of view. These questions will guide us in developing a conception
of the orrery as theatre.

According to Erkki Huhtamo, tracing topoi, analysing their trajectories and

transformations throughout cultural history, and measuring their effects on the
audience, is one of the goals of media archaeology. Following his cue, this article will
trace the orrery as a design that traverses media and performance culture, and gives
form to changing experiences and perspectives. As we shall see, the orrery is in fact
simultaneously a mechanism, an icon and a paradigm shift. It instigates new
understandings of the universe, and should in accordance with a media-archaeological
approach be analysed in the context of the specific cultural conditions in which it
appears and is discussed. It is my specific aim to identify some of the roles the orrery
has played in the cultural evolution of theatre. To demonstrate how the captivating
power of the orrery is intertwined with theatricality, I will begin by tracing the
dynamics of theatre and performance inherent in the design and the setup of the
mechanism, and its orientation toward the viewer. For this we need a short history of
the orrery as an inherently theatrical device, which, as we shall see, at some point in
time mounts the stage to transform into a theatrical space in its own right; in effect a
large machine in the form of an architectural or scenic installation specially crafted for
presenting performances. I will exemplify the functioning of the orrery by focusing on
case studies drawn from both the past and present. In this way, I hope to lay bare the
varied and often stunningly original manifestations of the orrery over time and,
conversely, also show the importance of astronomical discoveries and demonstrations
to our understanding of theatre and theatricality. Ultimately the orrery emerges as a
topos, and quite literally so, not merely as a discursive concept, but as a scale model
and a visual landing place for the spectator’s eye and the mapping of her position in
the universe.

Orreries across media

The nineteenth century saw astronomy applying developments in mathematics,

physics, chemistry and geology to understanding the composition of celestial bodies.
The British Empire in particular saw a flood of new planetary machines, optical
devices, crafted and marketed by skilled instrument-makers, as well as astronomical

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clocks of all shapes and sizes. There was a growing demand for such apparatus.
Looking back at the competitive context and the market value of these instruments, one
might safely suggest that the period witnessed a commodification of astronomical
devices. The construction of orreries was scattered across a wide range of these
technologies and the terminology used to describe their constituent parts is complicated
and inconsistently applied. A few factual details are given here about the desktop
model. First conceived in about 1704 by George Graham, a highly significant name in
the development of chronometry, the initial model showed only the Earth and the Moon
orbiting the Sun. Graham purportedly gave the design of this original model to the
celebrated London instrument maker John Rowley, who was commissioned to make
one for his patron Charles Boyle (1674-1731). This soon led to the further development
of Graham's invention to include all the planets of the known solar system. Boyle was
the 4th Earl of Orrery, thus lending his name to the device. Benjamin Martin, one of the
leading instrument makers of his time, went on in 1770 to include a mechanism that
could produce elliptical orbits. His orrery also differed from earlier ones by having the
planets on extended arms, rather than fixed on rotating plates and by adding
the “tellurian” which showed the inclined axis of the Earth and how it revolved around
the Sun, and the “lunarium” which showed the eccentric rotations of the Moon around
the Earth (Milburn 1973). Martin insisted on the scientific validity of the orrery. He
removed the decorative armillary sphere that encircled many orreries because, in his
own words, “there is really no such thing in Nature”. Thus he wrote, “(t)he Orrery I
propose is a bare Representation of the Solar System in its native Simplicity, and is, in
its self, sufficiently grand, and pompous; it stands in Need of none of the useless,
expensive, and cumbersome Embellishments of Art” (Martin 1771, 11).
Despite Martin’s efforts, emphasis on the scientific merit of the orrery did not
reduce its aesthetic appeal. On the contrary, by the end of the eighteenth century it was
slowly but securely evolving from an expensive scientific item to a token of exclusivity
and a marker of bourgeois prosperity. Instrument makers started producing smaller
versions for home use, including portable models that could be carried by itinerant
lecturers and popularizers of science. On page one of his 1784 book The Description
and Use of a New Portable Orrery, William Jones, who had once been Martin’s pupil,
prided himself on having constructed a version that “recommends itself for the Public
through simplicity and cheapness” (Jones 1784, 1).

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[Figure 7.1 inserted about here: William Jones’ portable orrery. Image from
The Description and Use of a New Portable Orrery. London: John Jones and
Sons, 1784. Author’s private collection.]

Along with the practical orreries, in other words, came a heightened interest in
spectacle as a means of popularizing science. Jones was one of those philosophical
instrument makers who understood very well that the role of the showman in particular
helped make the instrument trade so ubiquitous and he thereby succeeded in cultivating
a wide clientele (Stewart 2013). From then onwards, and, as we have shown elsewhere,
especially throughout the nineteenth century, spectacle and performance indeed
became widely accepted values in astronomical science (Bigg & Vanhoutte 2017).
As an artist who showed an early interest in mechanics and science, Joseph
Wright may have attended such a performative lecture on astronomy. One masterpiece
of British art, Wright’s celebrated painting A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the
Orrery in which a Lamp is put in Place of the Sun, was first exhibited in London in
1766. It is a summary image that powerfully expresses the ways in which theatre and
science are mutually imbricated and constitutive of our observation of the orrery.
Wright’s painting signals a radical change in the evolution of perspective itself. The
lecturer is, more specifically, reminiscent of Isaac Newton, whose theories on the
movement of the planets and universal gravitation were first published in 1687. In the
long run, it was Newton who worked out how the newly devised solar system, first
theoretically suggested by Copernicus and then empirically observed by Galilei, might
actually function. That is to say, the painting by Wright somehow stages Copernicus’s
conceptual leap, who asked himself a question that allowed him to envisage a
heliocentric universe. How would the heavens appear if viewed from the vantage point
of the Sun instead of the Earth? Copernicus, and, by the same token, the spectators in
the painting, stepped outside the existing model of the solar system and looked back at
it from an imaginary outside perspective, rearranging the theatre of the planets and sun
in an entirely new way.
Remarkably, even though in this case we do not see much of the turning of the
celestial bodies, we understand its impact through the gaze and fascination of the
spectators in the painting. Their faces gleam with the illumination of science. They are
serious, they are contemplating the planets. The receptivity of their minds is
furthermore underscored by the presence of children. They mirror our own curiosity
and position in respect of this miniature theatre of the skies. Whereas the two adults

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surveying the scene, with notes and pencil in their hands, confirm the source and
authority of scientific knowledge, the other spectators in the picture, especially the
children, are clearly mesmerized by the shining sun glowing in the darkened room.
This continuum of serious science teaching - here already associated with the act of
recording and writing - and modern spectacularization – the inherent theatricality – is
powerfully inscribed in the setting of the lecture. The darkened room housing the orrery
has been transformed into a space of theatricality, the lamp functions as stage lighting,
and the drapes in the upper right-hand corner of the frame reinforce the impression.
Moreover, scientific commitment and aesthetic delight seem to melt together in a
metaphysical glow that animates the whole scene. The demonstration of the orrery
awes as it informs: this is the sublime experience at the heart of Wright’s painting
(Molesworth 2015). The sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant
some years before Wright’s painting, was a term used to describe an extreme sense
experience, one that threatens to overwhelm even as it affirms the individual’s position.
The sublime is an intense response that arises from the tension between reason and the
senses, confronting the viewer of Wright’s painting with the sublimity of infinitude
(Duro 2010). The orrery itself, then, can be said to evoke the sublime, encouraging the
observer to experience the universe visually and rationally, to see it as simultaneously
within the reach of knowledge and the senses yet forever beyond epistemic grasp. This
tension is a fundamental attribute of the orrery seen as theatre.
As the relatively small size of typical orreries limited their impact, several
philosophical inventors working in the early nineteenth century attempted larger scale
simulations of the heavens. Looking at the often bizarre, but always spectacular history
of the planetarium theatre, one can but marvel at the paradoxical efforts of its designers
and engineers: the effort to replace the night sky as seen by the naked eye with an
artificial ceiling displaying that very same image, and, above all, the effort to make this
image work, to release its performative potential. In this light, the Great Gottorp Globe
(1717) might be considered a predecessor of the orrery as a performative space, as it
quite literally transformed the desktop model into a theatrical cabinet, establishing a
new point of view. The Globe was unique in its size and construction. It had an external
globe with a map of the earth and an internal planetarium with a map of the sky that
could rotate simultaneously. The stars were holes in the external globe, with light
shining in from outside. In 1717 this marvellous device became a diplomatic gift to
Tsar Peter The Great, who is said to have taken great interest in it, and who would

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frequently spend part of his mornings climbing inside the wooden ball through the
square door, to take a place on the ring bench at the round table, manually rotating the
mechanism fixed to the globe’s axis. This type of globe theatre was soon to become a
spectacular genre in its own right, leading to enormous and immersive panoramic
displays like Wyld’s Monster Globe in Leicester Square in the mid-nineteenth century
(King & Milburn 1978).

Today, the motions of the heavens are the business of highly specialized technological
environments. A dominant feature is the use of precision-engineering expertise
combining digital technology and lasers. In a way, they are the descendants of Jena’s
dome-shaped planetarium equipped with Zeiss optico-mechanical technology, the first
technological reproduction of the sky with moveable planets and the largest ever
intermedia temple when it was completed in 1924. Planetaria continue to be secluded
theatres built to accommodate the projection technology and the screen. The
architecture involves an overhead hemispherical panorama that reveals itself to the
earthbound viewer. It is worth noting that the image brought to the audience through
digital technologies and media still shares basic features with the original orrery. After
all, what the spectator witnesses as the eyes adjust to the dark continues to be a scale-
model of the universe, albeit elaborated in a much more complex, detailed and
enveloping way. Moreover, the mixed emotions of awe and reverence are still what
drives us to visit the present-day planetarium, and as a result, children are still often
among the audience. It could, however, also be argued that the present day projection
planetarium has more in common with cinema than theatre. Whereas early shows
would still have had a lecturer pointing to the starry sky and explaining the motions to
be seen, the performer today seems to have left the stage, leaving the spectator in the
arms of technology.
It should then come as no surprise, that contemporary film theorists find a fertile
field for the study of their discipline in cosmology and its significance for technology.
Some scholars even claim the orrery as the rightful predecessor of cinema from the
media-archaeological perspective. These claims share the interesting proposition that
we should abandon the opposition of “old” and “new” media. In doing so, these authors
rightly attribute an important function in cultural history to the orrery. However, these
approaches also take the remarkable step of assimilating the orrery into a linear and
teleological history by grounding the beginning of film in all things astronomical. “I

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want to claim”, Michael Punt writes in a book paying tribute to the media concepts of
media-archaeologist Thomas Elsaesser, “that the origins of cinema are not found in the
infinite regressions of Javanese shadow plays and experiments in ancient Greece with
photosynthesis, but can be located quite precisely in 1704, with Prince Eugene of
Savoy’s commission for a clockwork instrument that was nurtured in the hands of the
4th Earl of Orrery in the following years” (Punt 2008, 269). For him, the
cinématographe is a direct derivative of the orrery, an assertion that is not without a
dimension of technological determinism. The claim is all the more surprising, as an
obvious raison-d’être of media-archaeology is precisely to destabilize historical models
that favour “origins” and “beginnings”. In more general terms, Christophe Wall-
Romana recently recognized in the cinematic apparatus itself “the culmination of 19th
century astronomical intermedia”, a crowning point that purportedly spurred the
astronomical imagination in literature (Verne), early cinema (Méliès) and illustrations
(Grandville) (Wall-Romana 2015).
All in all, explanations like these tend to overemphasize the importance of a
single medium, in casu film, and to neglect other currents at work in media
transformations. In this case, no reference to theatre or the processes of theatricality is
to be found, a strange omission indeed, since theatre and theatricality are known to be
part and parcel of film history (Brewster 1997). I therefore want to challenge these
views by laying bare instances in history when the orrery became theatre. The
advantage of this approach is that it will open our eyes to a strange and fascinating
practice that incorporated and transformed the orrery from a technology into theatre -
and back again, if one recalls the contemporary use experimental performance art
makes of the orrery in times of digital projection, as I will demonstrate below.

Mounted on stage

When the orrery is considered as live art, the efforts of Adam Walker and his sons are
among the most noteworthy in their attempts to fuse theatrical illusion with educational
aspiration. Over the course of almost sixty years, from 1772 to well into the 1820s, the
Walker family in London offered an elaborately entertaining lecture entitled The
Eidouranion, from the Greek “form of the heavens”. Walker’s shows were much
discussed in the nineteenth century, which saw astronomy applying developments in
art, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geology. From these accounts over many

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years we can follow its success and acquire an idea of its performance. In their 1812
Epitome of Astronomy the Walkers described the “Transparent Orrery”, which formed
the heart of the performance, as

(…) from fifteen to twenty feet diameter: it stands vertically before the
spectators; and its globes are so large, that they are distinctly seen in the most
distant parts of a Theatre. Every Planet and Satellite seem suspended in space,
without any support; performing their annual and diurnal revolutions without
any apparent cause. It is certainly the nearest approach to the magnificent
simplicity of nature, and to its just proportions, as to magnitude and motion, of
any Orrery yet made; and besides being a most brilliant and beautiful spectacle,
conveys to the mind the most sublime instruction (…) (Walker 1812, 5-6)

The Eidouranion could be mounted on the stage and concealed by curtains during each
change of scene. In consequence, it is rather difficult to have a precise idea of what the
mechanism looked like and how it worked. An “old hand” in 1826 referred to it as “a
vertical arrangement of the old Orrery, with transparent or luminous planets”
(Wellbeloved 1826). There are nonetheless several theories regarding the mechanism
of the Eidouranion. Leading researchers in the field of the magic lantern regard it as a
device using a large phantasmagoria apparatus, painted glass slides and probably even
a parabolic mirror to set in motion the celestial globes, comets and spheres, and using
some kind of back projection to give astronomical effects on screen (Crangle & Van
Dooren 2005, 91). Other researchers have remained closer to the mechanism of the
orrery suggesting that “pinions mounted on a long, single arbor actuated a set of large
ring-wheel” (King 1978, 310).
Whatever the case may be, the major concern at the time was not the mechanism
of the wheelwork, as the theatricality and the overall scenic effect undoubtedly
constituted its greatest fascination for both young and old. In the final analysis,
therefore, an understanding of the orrery audience is essential, as it takes us one step
further in understanding the scope of these spectacles. From the start, competition
among astronomy lecturers was fierce and no means were left unused to reach the
audience. As early as 1809, the Annual Review, and History of Literature, a
compendium comprising 800 pages on topics as varied as geography, theology,
education, drama, science and experimental philosophy, voiced the following
complaint:

Of late years the number of those who appear before the public with matters
which require much previous learning and study, without having the necessary
qualifications, seems to have increased rapidly; formerly the opinion of

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inspiration was confined to religion alone, now it pervades every science and art
under heaven, and we have on all sides inspirati, arrived at perfect knowledge,
without having gone through the tedious paths of previous instruction.
(Anonymous 1809, 711)

In a way, astronomy lectures became instances of the emerging culture of mass

spectacle, and were at the time acknowledged as such by their audiences, as soon as
they demonstrated their ability to inspire the visitor with a mixture of reverence, awe
and authority, tying together strategies of dramaturgy and representation adopted from
theatre and melodrama, without, however, letting go of the scientific goals and
aspirations that motivated the shows in the first place. The famous lectures by Walker
and others were framed in these terms. They were admired as theatres of the skies in
which the celestial bodies are the actors, revolving around the main lecturer, who was
simultaneously director and actor, positioning himself in the middle of the scene – a
scene providing a dramatic narrative of cosmological proportions. At the same time,
astronomy as entertainment also always drew a measure of scepticism from
commentators who claimed that principles of scientific merit were seriously
compromised when the spectacular became the tabula rasa of the performance. An
integral part of the reviews of the Eidouranion and similar shows, then, was a critical
list that exposed all the factual errors made in the lecture on the evening it was
performed to the clear light of science and reason.

In 1808, just a year before the “old hand” lamented the flood of shallow showmen, the
Monthly Mirror wrote that Mr. Walker’s lecture, “(t)hough not void of amusement to
rational minds, is principally instructive, and the mode of instruction adopted by Mr.
Walker, assisted by his admirable Orrery, simplifies this stupendous, yet delightful
science, so as to bring its principles on the level with the meanest capacity”
(Anonymous 1808, 275). Adam Walker was usually highly praised for his knowledge
of science and his craftsmanship, but somewhat less for his charisma. After Walker’s
death in 1821, his youngest son, Dean, took over the show in its entirety. Dean was
undoubtedly the most theatrically minded member of the family, holding his lectures
in theatres such as the Theatre Royal, the King’s Theatre and the English Opera House.
Generally, a dramatic tableau is effective when it drives toward a point of change with
swift and seamless transformations of scenes, by no means an easy feat when large
mechanical structures fill the stage. To achieve a sense of drama, then, Walker’s son
used an ingenious combination of a glass harmonium, mechanical objects hanging in

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mid-air, transparent paintings and special lighting effects. “All at once”, an admirer in
1824 wrote,

the scene began to change; and, while the Celestina was giving an idea of the
music of the spheres, the Sun burst forth with its ever-moving rays, illuminating
the one-half of an elegant transparent revolving globe, two feet in diameter,
while the other half was enveloped in darkness: a representation which distinctly
showed the circle of perpetual illumination, at one time enlightening the north
pole, and then, by degrees, the whole frigid zone; and at another, receding from
the pole again, in the same manner, till it was lost in semi-annual darkness.
Meanwhile, the apparent progress of the Sun, or, the real progress of the Earth,
through the signs of the zodiac, and the changes of the seasons, were finely
elucidated, by a most beautiful transparent painting of these signs, that
surrounded the machine, and was comprehended in a circle of about 20 feet in
diameter. (Anonymous 1824, 20)

The visitor to the Eidouranion show furthermore emphasized Walker’s “amusing

manner of speech” and the fifth and last scene is reported to be the most spectacular
with the “approach of night (…) admirably imitated by the machinery employed, and
the spangled appearance of the firmament, with the milky way, powdered with stars”
(ibid. 22).

[Figure 7.2 inserted about here: Proscenium of the English Opera House,
Strand, 21 March 1817, with Walker's exhibition of the Eidouranion. Artist:
James Stow. © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.]

A spectacular dimension proved indispensable. One of Walker’s main

competitors was a child of the theatre. Sir Bartley was a genuine actor, most famous
for his role as Falstaff and no background in astronomy at all. He nevertheless started
delivering lecture performances in the 1820s in the same English Opera House where
Walker performed his. Bartley also made use of an orrery mounted on stage and called
it the Uranologia. A contemporary comparison makes it that Bartley’s star shone
brighter, as of the two “rival lecturers” it was he who was to be was credited with
delivering “a theatrical adventure, of great merit and curiosity”, presented “with great
solemnity and proper feeling (…) feelingly alive to the dignity of his subject”
(Wellbeloved 1826, 4). The same commentator lauded the innovative character of
Bartley’s shows in comparison to the solid but somewhat older version of Walker’s by
stating that Bartley was the first lecturer to use “planets (…) painted on glass (…) as
phantasma in the magic lantern” (ibid. 2). According to the reasoning of this
contemporary, Walker would have been using mechanical scenery rather than the
lantern. In any case the Eurolognia remained the property of the theatre and of Samuel

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Arnold, its manager and dramatist. In 1809 Arnold had obtained permission to stage
opera and other musical dramas, renaming London’s Lyceum Theatre as the English
Opera House. Under his auspices, the house staged the first English productions of
numerous operas alongside, so it seems, a scientific orrery theatre. The
entrepreneurship of Arnold and Bartley, together with Walker’s Eidouranion, clearly
demonstrates that the orrery had strong theatrical connections.
Questions relating to perspective and motion were interwoven and pushed to
their limits by the visualization techniques used in the theatre. The shows reorganized
the way people understood the perception of time and space, revealing a complex
universe in motion. In particular astronomy theatre gave spectators a model to reconcile
two points of view, the view from earth and the view that transcends the sense-based
individual. It articulated the cognitive functions of locating oneself in the universe and
of the importance of the spectator’s own motion to her perceptions as seen from her
point of view. In astronomy, the celestial bodies observed, in Walker’s case “the
apparent progress of the Sun” (cf. infra, my italics), are both distant and in motion, and
this is why our own movement through the universe, or “the real progress of the Earth”
(cf. infra, my italics), becomes a problem for perception. The earth’s rotation around
its own axis evades corporeal detection and can be understood only by studying and
making visible the mind in motion. The sense-based perception of our own centrality
(the “apparent”) had to be reconciled with astronomical theories of viewpoint and
motion (the “real”). This need to visualize explains the deep-rooted fascination with
orreries in the nineteenth century. It was a way to come to terms with deep epistemic
tensions.
But there is more to Walker’s scene than meets the individual’s eye. After all,
the transformative power of performance should not be underestimated. Staging the
orrery as a theatrical event also and by definition means organizing the perception of
the audience as a collective whole. Seen in this light, the orrery as theatre also most
certainly displayed a longing to get beyond the limits of individual perception. Co-
presence is by definition both the basis and boundary of a performance event and the
feedback loop between performer(s) and audience is a fundamental aspect of theatre.
It raises the barrier between actors and spectators to the point where, as performance
theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte has argued, “(r)ather the performance brings forth the
spectators and actors”, as “it aims at the involvement of all participants, in order to
create a reciprocal relationship of influence” (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 50). There is no

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doubt, then, that the visual representation of astronomical discoveries in the theatre
created a shared experience and a common scientific culture because the audience had
visual evidence that such a shared culture existed. As such, the theatre constituted an
important locus for staging and adopting the conditions of modern life.
It is safe to say that the orrery as theatre had an important role to play in the
development of the new modern state. In the remainder of this text, I will focus on two
specific expressions of theatre as orreries, both of which were very explicitly intended
to mould the minds of those who participated in the game. Here I am thinking of the
rather peculiar practice of “living orreries”. It is telling that these participatory
performances did not take place in any theatre, lecture hall or other locus where art
meets science in the nineteenth century, but on the school playground and in the
military training camp respectively. In these institutions, they could exert a far bigger
influence than in any art venue. I will describe the living orreries in conjunction with
their contemporary re-enactments in order to tease out their common features, working
principles and effects on the audience as well as their particularities and historical
specificities.

Living orreries

We have seen that one of the fundamental achievements of modern astronomy is the
ability to distinguish between the apparent and the real. In his Outlines of Astronomy
of 1849, the celebrated astronomer John Herschel highlighted the difference between
what he termed “relative and absolute motion”, referring to the bias in attributing our
own visual perception and point of view to the celestial bodies over our heads.

Nothing is easier to perceive than that, if a spectator at rest views a certain

number of moving objects, they will group and arrange themselves to his eye, at
each successive moment, in a very different way from what they would do were
he in active motion among them, - if he formed one of them, for instance, and
joined in their dance. (Herschel 1849, 55)

To use dance as a metaphor for what Herschel subsequently calls the effort to pass
“from the sensible to the real form” is a remarkable and imaginative way to frame the
problem. However, the author’s solution to the problem did not involve the movement
of dancing bodies. He rather saw the solution in the arrest of geometrical abstraction.
“The relative motion of two bodies is the same as if either of them were at rest, and all
its motion communicated to the other in an opposite direction”. This general rule is

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what we should bear in mind when picturing the relative motion of celestial bodies.
Herschel in other words preferred stasis over movement, contemplation over
sensibility. His suggestion is indicative of science becoming an authoritative form of
learning in the nineteenth century. Science became serious business and the means to
communicate knowledge production to an audience had to follow suit. One can easily
imagine that this also had caused him, at some earlier stage, to dismiss the orrery out
of hand. “As to getting correct notions”, Herschel firmly stated in A Treatise on
Astronomy, “by drawing circles on paper, or, still worse, from those very childish toys
called orreries, it is out of the question” (Herschel 1835, 272). Underscoring his point,
the astronomer added to this conviction a description of an orrery laid out on a “levelled
field or bowling green” using a globe for the sun and grains of mustard seed, sand,
peas, oranges and “a full sized cherry, or small plum” to represent each planet’s
trajectory (ibid. 271-272).
Yet, while Herschel’s description invited mockery, dancing orreries made
perfect sense to other didactic agents in the field. They make a strong case for what
today would be called embodied knowledge. In 1768, John Ryland published a detailed
account of his “living orrery, made with sixteen school-boys” in his Introduction to
Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (Ryland 1768, xix – xxi). The book was meant to be used
in schools. Ryland himself was the founder of Enfield Academy (to which the poet
Keats was sent in his adolescence), and it is not difficult to imagine the wonderful scene
as was set up in the school playground. Ryland describes how to map out the orbits of
the planets with a rope. Individual pupils were given cards identifying one of the
planets or moons and a little information to be learned and read out aloud. With these
cards, the pupil planets and moons took up their positions in an appropriate circle of
orbit around their classmates. And finally, Ryland commanded:

“(n)ow begin your play, (…) and then put your orrery in motion, giving each boy a
direction to move from west to east, Mercury to move swiftest, and the others in
proportion to their distances, and each boy repeating in his turn the contents of his
card, concerning his distance, magnitude, period, and hourly-motion. Half an hour
spent in this play once a week will in the compass of a year fix such clear and sure
ideas of the solar system as they can never forget to the last hour of life; and will
probably rouse sparks of genius, which will kindle into a bright and beautiful flame
in the manly part of life.” (Ryland 1768, xxi)

Ryland’s “methods of simplifying knowledge” echoed throughout the century to follow

and was lauded for its innovative character and graceful efficacy.1 At the centre of these

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lessons was the presence of God. In astronomical science and discoveries, he

recognized the vindication of faith through progressive knowledge.
More than two centuries after Ryland’s endeavour, the effort to fuse
performance and astronomy resonates in the activities of a network called the
Performing Astronomy Research Society, albeit in the context of a radically new world-
view. PARS is an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers from the human,
social, and exact sciences together with artists, visual technicians and planetarium
professionals formed to trace the history, present state and future of popular
astronomical spectacle. Combining academic research with artistic and professional
mediation, PARS is dedicated to the investigation of a locus where spatial and visual
cultures of modernity were (and continue to be) elaborated and experienced at the
intersection of science, technology and spectacle. Collectively members look into the
performance, the material and technological characteristics of astronomical shows,
their social and cultural contexts but also their perception and experience by different
audiences. They explore the ways in which the shared experience of astronomical
spectacles contributed to foster new senses of the collective and of the world in the
quintessential cities of modernity and beyond. An important component is arts-based,
experimental reconstruction as a heuristic for studying historical objects or events.
Artist Eric Joris and his theatre company CREW created Celestial Bodies, a family of
immersive and interactive virtual orreries through which approaches to and
methodologies for studying visual cultures could be developed to explore the
performativity of images, the bodily engagement of spectators and how embodied
experiences of spectacular astronomy might stimulate belief.2
Since 1998, the immersive live art of this Brussels-based company has
successfully challenged established conceptions of acting, (tele)presence,
spectatorship, theatricality and narration. Scientific reflection plays a constituent role
in CREW’s creative process as, since its inception, engineers from various universities
have developed new technologies for the company to use on stage and for exploring
the aesthetic possibilities of digital technologies. They have attracted much attention
with high-tech performances in which audience members are partially immersed in
virtual worlds. Characteristic of their working methods, is their use of various kinds of
head-mounted displays that present users with panoramic video images that respond to
the user’s viewing direction and movements. In this case, the solar system unfolds from
the direct encounter and interaction with the user. What the user then experiences is in

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turn projected on the screen for the other spectators to see, so that an interaction occurs
between embodied knowledge (the immersant inside the image) and critical
contemplation (the audience in front of the screen).
The immersant first sees the image of an avatar speaking in the voice of the
person who helped to don the display. The avatar introduces herself as a guide. Walking
around with her allows immersants to change their perspective and to explore the
relationships between the sun, earth, planets and moons and their movements relative
to one another and relative to themselves. The experience is immersive, if not
entrancing. As a result of direct collaboration with astronomers the company is now
for an example able to put the immersant into an orrery that depicts an existing universe
with two suns, or into the constellation that contains the seven recently discovered exo-
planets in orbit around a star. The embodied enactment is meant to fully capture and
engage the senses of the audience. There is a sense of displacement, a sharpening of
sensation, which produces a higher degree of sensory involvement. At the same time,
the relationship between the virtual world and the space from which it is activated is
brought to conscious attention time and again, for example when the guide invites the
immersant to touch a football on a string, the movements of which, tracked by motion
capture, will be used to create an impression of the sun in orbit in the virtual space. In
other words a connection is staged between the avatar as encountered in the virtual
universe and an actual person in the space in which the immersant finds herself. This
connection highlights how the virtual universe is generated through a digital interface.3
The result of such a dialectic between empathy and distance, immersion and
contemplation produces embodied knowledge of the universe as we know it today. It
makes us aware that our view of the stars entirely on our body, its relative motion and
performance in space. The installation in particular suggests a universe that has no
centre, no privileged vantage point or abstract view from above. In other words,
immersive and omni-directional technology makes tangible what the desktop orrery,
the orrery as theatrical exhibition or even the dome-shaped planetarium of the twentieth
century could not provide, as these orreries by default implied, and still imply, a central
viewpoint. Instead, Celestial Bodies articulates concerns that are more in line with
Ryland’s orrery and that are, paradoxically enough, also more in accordance with our
present-day knowledge of the universe. A few years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope,
a spacecraft exploring our universe, provided mankind with a new map of the universe
containing about 5,500 galaxies. We are not at the centre. The immersive re-enactment

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takes this ontological shift into account, as the immersant is able to dance amidst the
planets and to freely choose her vantage point. As such, Celestial Bodies goes beyond
pure mimicking operations, constituting instead a vigorous field of activity in which
the many tangled notions and ideas essential to the art of projection are actively
renegotiated by re-inventing historical sources – notions such as immersion,
spectatorship and interactivity.
The confrontational encounter between different representation media provokes
innovative perceptions of astronomy and stimulates insight into the modes of
understanding and how these modes are available to human perception. The immersant
learns by doing. By actually making her capable of switching between points of view
Celestial Bodies does indeed suggest that cognition is embodied in the senses and that
knowledge is based on perception and bodily actions. It does not come as a surprise
that cognitive mapping of the universe through the practice of the human orrery
persisted into the 1930s, when Germany built its first planetaria aimed at fostering
“spatial thinking” among pupils.4 Even today, the method of offering a multi-
perspective view of the solar system by making people play the part of the planets
moving in their orbits continues to be an educational tool for astronomy.5 The
framework of these practices is drawn from contemporary embodiment theory and
education, where the foundation of cognition in perception and proprioception is the
central focus.6 This knowledge can be said to be an implicit intuition already at play
when the Reverend Ryland made “his boys” dance the orrery in 1768.

Under the sign of Saturn

“Is it possible to lead an eccentric life? Is it possible to bear the thought of endless
evolution and of boundless spaces?” (Lemaire 2007, 112; my translation) Ton Lemaire
tackles these philosophical questions in his book about the landscape as culture. He
focuses on the ritualistic iteration of a sacred midpoint and the subsequent urge of
modern man to embark on a voyage into an expanding universe, leaving the midpoint
behind. His recognizes this evolution in the ways in which we organize our landscapes.
Whereas the iteration of a cosmic centre exemplifies a mythical origin, history as
science is initiated with a move towards the peripheral. According to Lemaire, the best
way to measure this topography is by walking. The walker orbits the centre and her
steps map the distance between her and the centre. Lemaire’s figure helps us to shed

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light on the designation of the centre in astronomical walks. This in turn will make
something explicit about the ways in which the concept of walking orreries goes hand
in hand with strategies of representation and ideology.
Clearly, in the mid-eighteenth-century, at the centre of the orrery was God. The
teachings of the Rev. Ryland, along with his empirical learning methods, were inspired
by a spiritual imperative. Astronomical discoveries demonstrated God’s presence in
the universe and the orrery revealed and expanded the beauty of His creation. This is
probably also why Ryland’s descriptions are so cheerful: they express an evangelic
fervour and conviction. How different is the tone of voice when we compare his orrery
with the military orrery proposed by Major-General Grant De Vaux, who, around 1808,
had likewise detailed a “walking orrery”. De Vaux wanted his orrery to be executed
“on a grass-plot in the Isle of Wight”, making his planet-soldiers go through their
exercises and march at the word of command. The military men would be tied to the
centre by cords, leaving no doubt as to the locus of control. “In the centre”, De Vaux
proposed, “should be a round pavilion, having a sky-light, and windows all round”.

This pavilion will be our observatory, and at the same time will represent the sun
in the middle of our planetary system. As this pavilion must contain company
and music, etc. it must be at least 20 feet diameter (…) The sun itself will be a
circular collection of reflectors, or a focus of the brilliant light possible, and the
pavilion will be erected over it, being supported by light pillars, in order that the
spectators or observers in the pavilion may see better the effect of the whole;
which they could not, if their eyes were struck with lights. Each of the globular
transparencies of the planets will be the head of some sort of god and goddess,
such as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and his most gracious majesty
Georgium [Uranus], sitting in little cars; which cars will be directed from west to
east, and drawn by seven soldiers, or other men accustomed to march in
measure. (Aiken 1809, 713)

Careful shaping of the transparencies, making them receptive to light from the centre,
would make the various phases of the planets apparent. It was furthermore the duty of
the musicians to pace the steps of the planet-soldiers and to regulate each measure to
be of two seconds in time. “To put this planetary system in motion at pleasure”, De
Vaux contented, “you have only to give your order, to make a signal, or to say “march”;
then the music beginning to play a march, and each soldier making his steps in measure,
the planets will execute the revolution” (ibid. 714). Meanwhile, stars would be
represented by a light in a ship in the bay at some distance from the pavilion and
meteors by “some small rockets fired from the pavilion in an oblique direction” (ibid.).

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It is difficult to say exactly it was that motivated De Vaux to envision this

strangely elaborate spectacle. As a descendant of a family of nobles who had emigrated
from Scotland to France, De Vaux became an army officer in Normandy. He was forced
by the revolution in France to flee to Great Britain in 1790. Shortly before devising his
orrery in the mid-1790’s, he was granted the position of colonel and obtained
permission to raise a regiment, which he formed with other French émigrés. Surely
then, there is more than a hint of royal ideology at work here, including reminiscences
of the courtly ballets of the kings of France, the Sun King Louis XIV and his successors.
While the centre remained fixed, it was now also rooted in a conception of physical
reality that differed from Ryland’s. De Vaux’s orrery is not so much about bridging the
gap between Earth and Heaven than it is about political spectacle, discipline and
control. That the Empire did not think highly of the French adventurer is not
exceptionally surprising. British commentators particularly ridiculed his high-minded
effort to educate and dismissed his scientific aspirations, claiming that the
revolutionary findings of their compatriot Newton did not back up De Vaux’s
assertions (ibid. 715 et passim). They implicitly knew that, for De Vaux, the orrery
functioned as a mobile theatre in which the unity of state, science and authority was
reaffirmed as a military parade among the stars. It tendered a vision of how the soldier,
the scientist and the statesman could work together in the conquest and organization of
nature, new territories and societies.
The military orrery is expansive. Expansion is a movement of appropriation or
assimilation whereby consciousness moves beyond itself, relativizing the assertion of
stability and central reference due to myth. The near-absence of myth from science is
a fundamental issue: it is what makes modern science modern. Science conquers
religion and relegates it to a form of pre-modern existence. However, there has also
been a wealth of literature in recent times insisting that myth persists.7 A defining
feature of modernity is that spirits, apparitions and magic do still hold appeal for
contemporaries and that attempts to suppress myth in the sciences have more often
failed than succeeded. Technological progress is also always an act, which reassembles
the residual mythical mindsets. This is why, in our case, even the most contemporary
planetarium still visualizes the signs of the zodiac, using them as an alphabet to
structure and organize the impenetrable largeness of the universe we inhabit.
This perhaps also explains why contemporary orreries tend to engage with the
melancholic, the nostalgic, and the darker tones of the spectrum of emotions.

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Astronomy in general is a melancholy pursuit, due to the vastness of the endeavour,

and this is made the more so by the urge to somehow (re)connect. Every orrery
inevitably balances the tension between history and what transcends us. It holds within
it the natural habitat of the poignancy of things. This is all the more true for
contemporary versions of the orrery. Henner’s Astronomical is a case in point.
Moreover even though melancholy as an aesthetic emotion was not intended, a basic
feature of Celestial Bodies nonetheless invites the participant to experiment with the
relation between self, technology and, ultimately, a sense of disembodiment. It is as
much about incorporating new knowledge as it is about losing one’s self. While
Celestial Bodies makes the effects of a “decentering” universe palpable, at the same
time it engages with the loss of sense of body. There is a solitude of space. The
immersant is in the falcon-hood seclusion of the head-mounted display. The exclusion
of outside stimuli is a necessary condition of virtual reality. It leads the solitary
participant to experience an artificial universe prepared by the artist. An important
condition of Celestial Bodies, then, is the negotiation the immersant constantly has to
make between corporeality, the here-and-now of the body and the immersive,
expanding universe that she empathically senses. This back-and-forth leads to a
heightened sense of presence, between the real and the virtual. She is “there”, but never
really there.8

“They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone,
perfectly individualized and constantly visible”, reads the quote that accompanies the
three versions of Saturn, the large orrery that Belgian performance artist Karl Van
Welden has installed in various public spaces.9 Sequentially named Saturn I, II and III
they became respectively, part of a stretch of coastal dunes, part of an urban landscape
and part of the transitional area between countryside and the city, where cultivated
nature and scattered housing define one another. The quote is from Michel Foucault,
who famously described a type of prison and a system of discipline and control devised
in the eighteenth century: the mere fact that the inmates, who occupy cells ordered
around a central pavilion, know that they can be watched (without them seeing the
supervisor) compels them to constantly monitor their own behaviour. The quote is a
perfect match for the military orrery (and one indeed wonders if De Vaux actually knew
the panopticon as designed by Bentham in 1781). Van Welden, for his part, seems to
be as much interested in the melancholic dimension of the individuation process as in

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processes of discipline and control. His focus is on the lost connection between myth
and history. In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was a primordial giant with multiple
eyes looking every way and who never slept. Van Welden’s United Planets Cycle, a
series of works including the installations Mars, Pluto and Mercury, accordingly
aspires to a prehistoric monumentality. The work functions as a mediator between
human-sized actions and cosmic dimensions.
In Saturn, the spectator takes a place in an observation post, individually
zooming in on details in the surroundings through a telescope. Her eye wanders, pauses
and eventually fixes on one of the strangely isolated figures in the distance, some of
them four kilometres away. There, she detects one of the six actors who seem to be
ritualistically performing their tiny gestures. Mnemosyne, daughter of Saturn and
personification of memory is seen standing backwards in the landscape, only
occasionally turning to glance behind her. Encircling the central observatory are her
sisters and brothers, the other moons of the planet Saturn. It was John Herschel who
suggested in 1847 that Saturn’s satellites should be given the names of the mythological
figures associated with the planet. Eventually it became the convention for naming the
satellites of the superior celestial bodies. From the system that developed over time
Van Welden selected six Titans and Titanides: Oceanos, Tetis, Hyperion, Lapetos,
Mnemosyne and Reia. Only the latter, both daughter and wife of Saturn, being also
topographically closest to the centre, occasionally looks at the spectator and establishes
some sort of contact. In mythology she was also the one who saved her son Zeus by
handling her father a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he took for his son
and immediately swallowed. Saturn had seized upon the government of the universe
by his superiority over his father and mother. He devoured his sons as soon as they
were born, but ultimately was confined in Tartarus. This prehistoric revolution would
create the conditions for the birth of mankind from the Olympic gods and, as Van
Welden’s orrery performance seems to suggest, initiate modern history and the
progressive distancing from the origin. What persists in Saturn is the gap between myth
and history.

[Figure 7.3. inserted about here: Topographic map of the installation Saturn I,
by Karl Van Welden, on the island Terschelling, with the black dot indicating
the central observation post, 2011.]

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Saturn represents the distance between the celestial bodies we see and their
significance, expressing the absence of transcendence from within. The atmosphere is
accordingly elegiac. The visitor in the pavilion determines her own time while the
performers keep on playing without interruption. The installation solicits and frustrates
the spectator’s desire that what she sees should be directly transparent regarding its
signification. Hers is the kind of receptivity that brings to mind Siegfried Krakauer’s
astute “observation on the possible role of melancholy in photographic vision”:

Now melancholy as an inner disposition not only makes elegiac objects seem
attractive but carries still another, more important implication: it favours self-
estrangement, which on its part entails identification with all kinds of objects.
The dejected individual is likely to lose himself in the incidental configuration of
his environment, absorbing them with a disinterested intensity (…). (Krakauer
1960, 17)

When noting this observation in his Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical
Reality, Krakauer was analysing the formative tendency of melancholy in photography
and film. Melancholy recurrently casts the spectator in the role of a stranger detached
from public space, “strolling about aimlessly: as he proceeds, his changing
surroundings take shape in the form of juxtaposed shots of house façades, neon lights,
stray passers-by, and the like” (ibid.) A similar logic applies to Saturn. The installation
is all about framing, cutting and montage. It forces a geometrical pattern and a
perspective, the design of an orrery, onto a natural landscape for the spectator to
scrutinize. Only here the spectator becomes aware of her own sense of detachment by
being immobilized behind the lens of a telescope. She is left alone in a “decentered
centre”, the seat of Saturn, an empty space in a framed environment – “like so many
cages, so many small theatres”. Thus melancholy motivates and rationalizes the visual.

Conclusion

The orrery is a theatre of the sky, where earthly concerns are played out. The scale
model of the universe has always served representative purposes for their patrons,
whether as the symbol of an aristocratic statesman (Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery),
a demonstration of the divine authority of the law of nature (Ryland), the scientific and
cultural excellence of a nation (Walker, Sir Bartley) or as an exhibition of military
values (De Vaux). Today, in the wake of loss of the social orders where stability reigns,
of metaphysical guarantees and autonomous selves, we encounter a distinctively

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melancholic feature (Joris, Van Welden). We have noted that astronomy in general is
a melancholy pursuit, because it re-enacts the space between us, especially when
astronomical knowledge is turned into spectacle. Given the human faculty of image-
making, we are always removed or alienated from ourselves via the visual images we
make and display in front of us. If theatre derives from the Greek “theatron”, meaning
both “gathering place” and “vision”, does the history of the orrery not then share
something of the profundity of the theatre? The scale model of the universe operates
between art and science, the fictitious and the real. It replays the seeming gap inherent
in the spectacle. And yet, in the here and now of our encounter with these images
something of a reconnection takes place. We acknowledge this interrelation most
vividly in human orreries, through the awareness to gesture, movement and the co-
presence of living bodies. It reappears when we give the orrery to the history of
performance.

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1
See: Rylandiana, Newman’s tribute to the Rev. Ryland in 1835, which includes the cards
that were used during the performance. Here are two examples: “CARD 1: I represent the
great Sun, the centre of light, heat, and attraction to all the planets. My diameter is 890,000
miles. I am above a million times bigger than the Earth, and 540 times bigger than all the
planets together. I turn round upon my axis in 25 days.” (Newman 1835, 120); “CARD 12: I
represent stupendous Saturn. My diameter is 78,000 miles. I move around the Sun in 29 ½
years, at a distance of 907,000,000 miles, and at the rate of 22,000 miles an hour.” (Ibid. 121)
2
See: www.parsnetwork.org . See Vanhoutte & Bigg 2014 on the precepts of PARS and the
role of CREW’s embodied orrery. Also, for a conversation about CREW’s experimentations
and experience of working on the borders between artistic practice, science and technological
innovation for over a decade, see, in the same issue the interview with Eirini Nedelkopoulou.
3
According to Maaike Bleeker, who examined CREW’s Celestial Bodies in the context of
digital media studies: “(T)hey show the universe itself as a phenomenon that cannot be
disjoined from the generativity of the human–technology configurations in which the world
and the universe get articulated in an ongoing, open-ended process” (Bleeker in Bigg and
Vanhoutte 2017, 256)
4
Charlotte Bigg mentions a handbook written in 1934 by Jena teacher Otto Deinhardt and
distributed by Zeiss that shows how “the human planetarium” was scheduled for school
groups complementary to a visit to the planetarium: “Each age group was assigned different
exercises, from drawing the constellations to measuring the height of the sun at different
times of the year. Several of these exercises involved children embodying planets and re-

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 [Part II The Apparatus and the Body]

enacting the motions of the solar system’s different bodies.” Accordingly, “schoolgirls were
chosen according to size to embody the sun and the planets. They were made to pace along
concentric orbits traced with chalk on the schoolyard. The ‘Planetenkinder’ demonstrated in a
simple but effective manner that planets closer to the sun were quicker to complete one full
circle.” (Bigg in Bigg and Vanhoutte 2017, 214)
5
Some contemporary practices are described in an article in Astronomy Education Review,
“The Human Orrery: A New Educational Tool for Astronomy” (Asher 2007)
6
For a state of the art report on embodiment theory and education see Kiefer & Trumpp
2012.
7
Elkins & Morgan 2009; Josephson-Storm 2017.
8
On the phenomenology of this experience in CREW’s performances, see Vanhoutte &
Wynants 2011: “In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on
the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and
mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed
to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the
experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one
tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ to a
meaningful experience.” (275)
9
See: www.verenigdeplaneten.be

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