About

To measure the world is to generate it. Across Buddhist, Islamic, and other Asian traditions, astronomical, geomantic, and architectural calculations were never treated as neutral descriptions, but as ways of bringing a world into being. The Islamic astrolabe turns the sky into calculable coordinates. The Chinese revolving lantern sets a painted world in motion by heat and light. In Borobudur, a pilgrim’s body computes cosmological ascent as they climb the terraces of a 9th-century Buddhist stupa.

Artificial intelligence performs that same operation today, under the sign of technical neutrality, occluding what these traditions held in full view. A generated image is only the visible surface of a much larger, invisible act of measurement. Every time a machine learns, it measures: embeddings compute distance, loss functions minimize error, latent spaces propose coordinates that behave as worlds. A trained model is a cosmogram, an object that maps the universe and, in the same gesture, generates one.

The exhibition unfolds in three parts.

Apparatus of the Cosmos brings together pre-modern measuring instruments as image-generating devices. At its center are reproductions of astronomical glass plates from the Harvard Plate Stacks, through which astronomers once measured, cataloged, and imaged the night sky. This section is the exhibition’s archaeological layer, establishing its historical foundations.

The Measuring Body turns to how contemporary practice reactivates this measure-to-generate operation through new media, engaging the history of astronomical observation, satellite and orbital data, and cross-continental measurement.

Cosmology of the Latent Space reconsiders this central operation of Artificial Intelligence as a contemporary cosmogram: when a coordinate system determines what can be rendered visible, measurement becomes part of cosmology itself.

Artists
Amélie Bouvier, Zhanyi Chen, Rohini Devasher, Behnaz Farahi, Maria Takeuchi, Jiayue Cecilia Wu, Yufeng Zhao

Schedule

Opening Program | November 7
2:00 PM — Doors Open
2:30 PM — Opening Remarks
3:00 PM — Artist Remarks
3:30 PM — Live Performance by Maria Takeuchi and Alec Fellman
4:30 PM — Reception
6:00 PM — Closing

Exhibition Dates and Hours
November 7–21, 2026, Friday–Sunday, 11:00 AM–4:00 PM ET

Free and open to the public. Resignation is required.