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GIPpy / Workshop AA / PUC 2015
Designed by Soviet engineer Yuri Streletsky early in the 1960s, three telescopes generically called GIP (Grand Passage Instrument) were built by the renowned LOMO factory within the workshops of the Pulkovo Observatory in Saint Petersburg. The domes for the telescopes - also designed by Streletsky - were identical structures distributed across such distant places, one in Caucasus, and one to Calán Hill in Santiago.
Subjected now to recuperation and renewal, the 2015 AA Visiting School to Santiago took the dome, the telescope and their various associated equipment as pieces of technological archaeology, towards developing an astronomical museography onsite. Collecting, classifying, inventorying, finding, editing and unraveling were part of the operations that were tested.
The workshop combined design and theoretical enquiry while investigating a panoply of architectural, technical, art historical, literary and cinematic images and references, all helping us to reimagine the cultural and political context for the installation of such technologies for space observation.
Proposing design scenarios that transformed the site by introducing new programs associated to the recovery of derelict and obsolete equipment, in truly archaeological fashion.
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