[Text available only in English] In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr.Stuhlinger, the associate director of science at NASA. In the letter, Sister Jucunda questioned how he can suggest spending billions of dollars on projects exploring Mars at a time when countless children suffered from poverty. Dr.Stuhlinger wrote back with an iconic image of earth taken in 1968 from the moon. He explained that the earth is a beautiful but vulnerable island in an unlimited void. In the letter, he mentioned “Although our space program seems to lead us away from our Earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars, I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much attention and study by space scientists as our Earth. It will become a better Earth, not only because of all the new technological and scientific knowledge which we will apply to the betterment of life, but also because we are developing a far deeper appreciation of our Earth, of life, and of man.“

Inspired by Dr. Stuhlinger’s letter, Astro is an audio-visual artwork that examines the question of ‘why explore space’ from an artistic and imaginative point of view. In Astro, our earth, the only astronomical object known to harbor life, is unfolded through the lens of an intelligent being in outer space. As it rotates the lens to zoom in and out, the journey of observation brings the multi-scale discoveries of ecological changes and machinic visions with an artistic imagination: from a vast forest where the flames roar into the wild creatures to the melting iceberg revealing hidden information, from the diagrams of ancient pseudoscience (astrology) to the latent walk of AI’s generation, from the data-driven landscape to the algorithmic generative visuals, from climate change to the creature’s migration. This audio-visual work poses a question: why explore space in the context of known and unknown as well as folding and unfolding.