I made an artwork by plotting the sun's position over a person's lifespan

In 2020, there was an open call for an exhibition of solargraphy in London. Solargraphs are very long exposure photos of the sun – exposures can be years long – I wanted to create a sort of modern, digital version with an even longer ’exposure’. I chose the duration as a person’s lifespan (averaged at 80.96 years from the day of the photography exhibition) projecting into the future (until 2101). The gallery liked it and it was exhibited just before the pandemic got really bad in London. Unfortunately, it was just pre-lockdown and no one could really go to the gallery, so I thought I'd share on here.

I used a library called PySolar (https://github.com/pingswept/pysolar) to calculate the sun’s position relative to the gallery space’s longitude and latitude. I exported 8 million xyz position points (I think a point every 10 minutes) to a txt file which I could then read in Houdini, and use to trace out the path of the sun. I really like you can see things like the Summer and Winter solstices very clearly, and the passing of each year. The ground plane, upwards, north and east are included for orientation. Very happy to share the .hip file if anyone's interested.

The music on the video is ‘William Basinski - dlp 1.1’.