Archived, May 2026. Constellation ran on the household dashboard for three months. It was retired in favour of The Long Take — a per-room time-tube that proved easier to read at a glance than the whole-house sky. The page below stays up because the piece is worth describing, and because the lessons it taught about ambient-vs-surveillance framing carried into everything that came after.
Constellation is a fragment shader that renders the house’s sensors as a slow-moving night sky. Thirty-two sensors are mapped to thirty-two astronomical objects, drawn from a deliberate taxonomy. The phone moves through the house as a literal comet, ion tail trailing. The washer’s start-cycle is a fast radio burst. The Yale lock is a magnetar — pulsing on a regular interval, brighter when something recently woke it. The Hive thermostat is a Cepheid variable, its brightness rising and falling with the room temperature. The TV, when on, is the central black hole at the centre of the frame, with gravitational lensing arcs visible around it whenever a media event fires nearby.
The mappings are not arbitrary. They were chosen by analogy — the phone’s room-to-room movement is the cleanest match for an orbital trajectory, the washer’s brief intense activity is the cleanest match for the highest-energy transient events in radio astronomy. The shader implements real blackbody redshift over time, real spectral colours for stars by surface temperature, real gravitational lensing geometry for the central body. The astrophysics is correct.
The piece is a sustained metaphor. It works because the metaphor is worked out completely — every sensor class has a celestial counterpart, every counterpart has a real astronomical analogue, and the visual vocabulary is consistent across the whole shader.
It is also the piece that critiques the Quantified Self register most directly. A dashboard of the same data — thermostat at 19°C, phone in the bedroom, washer running on cycle 3 — reads as surveillance. The same data as a constellation reads as observation. The information content is identical; the relationship to the watcher is not.