A building that watches the Moon

2026

First a painting sensed its surroundings. Then a typewriter tried to understand you. Then a dress asked who it was. Now a whole building watches the sky.

For Observatory, we imagined Paribu Art as a curious being that looks up at night through a virtual telescope on its roof. But if it was going to watch the Moon, it should watch the real one — where it really is tonight, which phase, which stars behind it. In a moment the poetic idea became astronomy, geometry and real-time data: NASA's lunar surface data and about 120,000 stars.

The sentence we use to describe it is one I love, because I think it describes what I do: a poetic image, a numerical backbone.