“a.l.m.a.” pictures the largest astronomical observatory on our planet, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in the Atacama Desert in Chile. ALMA is a unique telescope array composed of sixty-six high precision moveable antennas located in the extremely dry air of the Chajnantor plateau at an altitude of 5,000m. Inaugurated in 2013 the telescope is expected to provide insight into the birth of stars in the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formations. Looking into the universe always means looking into our past. The ALMA antennas transform what is invisible and immaterial into something tangible and substantial, which will give us a deeper understanding of who we are and where we come from.

The artwork is a fusion of daytime and nighttime scenery, whose digital recomposition highlights the extreme technical precision of the antennas and their relationship to the target area from which the data comes – the universe. The starry sky is not the one we can see with our naked eye but shows far distant galaxies and stars billions of light years away – all data captured by the ALMA antennas.