In the middle of the nineteenth century, during the Great Potato Famine, Dudley Sarsfield Brennan and Mary Colcough left Ireland and crossed the Atlantic to Argentina. I imagine them on the deck at night, breathing the cold ocean air as familiar constellations disappeared and unknown stars emerged above them. I imagine a mixture of grief and hope, an awareness of being small beneath the immensity of the universe: a ship crossing a dark sea on a planet drifting through space. They eventually settled in Magdalena, where their son Patricio was born in 1870. More than twenty years later, Enrico Vivo and Maria Viva made a similar journey from Anacapri, Italy, to Argentina. Though the two couples never met, they shared the experience of migration and became part of the same lineage. From one side of that lineage, I inherited the name Patricio; from the other, the surname Vivo.

I stand at the far end of their horizon, beneath a different sky, with only fragments of their stories and the sky itself. From this desire to connect across time, I created Weaver: a way of threading my present to their future and my past to their present, a way of seeing what they saw and allowing future generations to see what I see.

Weaver is an interactive work that invites two people to meet across time and space through a shared fragment of the night sky. Like a prayer or a ritual, it offers a passage beyond immediate experience into a quiet awareness of what connects us, not despite distance, but through it.

Two celestial maps overlap: one for each observer. Each is rendered in a distinct color, reflecting the night sky from a specific place and moment. In the region where the maps intersect lie the constellations both participants share, a common sky that exists beyond distance or time.

Each map uses a polar projection. Stars near the outer edge rest close to the horizon (marked by the cardinal directions), while those at the center hover directly overhead. This perspective situates each observer within their own sky, while revealing where their visions align.

Beside each map, a rotating globe marks the observer’s location. Both the celestial maps and the globes are fully interactive. By dragging the sky, you can shift the date and time; by rotating the globe, you can reposition the observer anywhere on Earth. Mounted as a site-specific installation, one map can be fixed to the present location, anchoring the visitor’s own sky, while the second opens onto a single chosen place and time, or sequences through several.

This is a custom real-time software code using my own OpenGL/C++ framework called VERA running on a Raspberry Pi, mounted on a wooden frame carved with a CNC and some bronze tubes. 

The software shows the shared section of the sky between the space it’s mounted and a list of positions where ancestors have been.

Thanks to VERA, the software also runs as an embedded in the browser. That version is interactive, you can set each side (A and/or B) to two different positions in space and time, and visualize the common section of the night sky in real-time.

Project Page | Patricio Gonzalez Vivo