resistant atlas is a body of work that explores the reconstruction lost environmental logics through essays, digital tools, and physical artifacts.

namely, it explores the way bedouin arabs experienced and lived through time and space - a context-specific environmental psychology that is mirrored across every civilization living in a barren landscape - the desert, the plains, the arctic, the sea.

the project focuses is on sky-based logics; the movement of the stars, the moon, the sun, and how they have communicated time and space for hundreds of thousands of years, before our reliance on modern tools. the slow shift from environmental temporal and spatial logic to a flattened logic carries endless worlds of change, from political, to psychological, to cultural, to infinite others.

currently, resistant atlas is in it’s first chapter; names of the sun.

1. Reverse Sundial

A 5-ft diameter acrylic “reverse” sundial that uses the sun’s gleam (as opposed to its shadow) to reveal which sun from the Resistant Atlas: Names of the Sun research corresponds to the sun overhead. Rather than telling time, it translates the sun’s visual alignment into the definitions drawn from the meteorology archives.

A 2 meter diameter ‘reverse sundial’ engraved out of frosted acrylic, serving as a way to make the names of the sun research into a tangible, rotating device, calibrated for 40 degrees latitude, with different configurations for the summer, winter, fall, and spring sun height.

Setting up the sundial on the lawn of Columbia University, NYC.

At night, projections make the sundial alive.

2. Reverse Sundial (Nighttime Use)

After dark, or indoors, the sundial transforms into an interactive installation. A projected interface maps onto the dial, and as the arm moves, it dynamically updates to display the corresponding sun name in real time.

3. Sun Remote

A handheld ‘sundial’, which is connected to the larger installation, allows viewers to point toward any part of the sky, in which the larger dial will respond to in real time. This component reintroduces the embodied, environmental logic once used to understand the sun to the viewer in today’s time and orientation logic. This system integrates Arduino, ESP32, JavaScript, and TouchDesigner.

4. Booklet – Resistant Atlas: Names of the Sun

A printed booklet archiving the sun names explored in this project.

the above remote is connected to the larger projection and controls it in real time.

5. Pamphlets

next..

The upcoming exploration, Houses of the Moon, is a study of lunar stations, or where the moon seems to mark the night sky, and the intricate environmental logic they chart over time. they hold immense historical, navigational, and poetic significance, and these movements shaped the temporal and spatial frameworks we are familiar with today

“invisible tools”