This year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria will feature the debut of Cultural Astronomy, a brand new experience in the DeepSpace8K 3D immersive theater. Detailed 3D scans of cultural heritage sites will be combined with high-resolution terrain data and precision astronomical simulation to experience their context in space and time.
The DeepSpace8K team and I have talked for years about our shared fascination with the long legacy that connects human imagination and culture with the sky, and the potential to explore these themes in a collaborative public program. When I visited the Ars Electronica Center in June of 2025 in addition to foundational training on content and program creation in OpenSpace and optimizing their installation of the software, we also specifically focused on developing the skills that would empower their team to produce this program. We also applied some custom enhancements to OpenSpace that would let them explore these sites in unique ways that have never been done before.
Exploring the connection between human culture and astronomy has always been a theme in my career. One of my first planetarium productions was Stars of the Pyramids, an in-house production at the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that we developed in support of a traveling exhibition of artifacts from the reign of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III. This program was developed for the era of aligned arrays of slide projectors and the unique Digistar II 3D projector that was the heart of that planetarium. Even with the limits of those technologies, I hand-painted panoramas to transport audiences to the Egyptian desert and visualized the ancient Egyptian understanding of the sky with wireframe 3D models. Ultimately that program would be licensed to other planetariums as the exhibit continued its travels.
Over the years I’ve provided audiovisual support for a wide range of lectures and special programs on the cultural history of astronomy, and benefitted from the incredible experience of working directly with many top researchers in the field.
It’s been a privilege to revisit this topic with modern immersive technology, the live presentation power of OpenSpace and skills of the DeepSpace8K team, especially with the range of sites they are visualizing from around the world.
