Alchemical Cosmography

The Alchemical Cosmography brush in Aleph Null 3.0 by Jim Andrews mixes 158 images concerning the combinatorial thought of Ramon Llull (13^th century), Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz (17^th century), the inventive musings of Athanasius Kircher (17^th century), Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosica (17^th century), the star maps of (18^th century) Alexander Jamieson, the 16^th century thought of alchemist Robert Fludd, Stephan Michelspacher's (17^th century) cabbalistic images, and much more.

The alchemists look now like the experimental media artists of their time. In 1646, Athanasius Kircher published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, on the subject of the display of images on a screen using an apparatus similar to the magic lantern as developed by Christiaan Huygens and others. But the images are alchemical. The thought is magical and alchemical shot through with the combinatorial, the mixture of writing and images, the 'experimental'. Many of the cosmological images in Alchemical Cosmography are geocentric. Copernicus died in 1543, but of course the heliocentric model of the solar system was not immediately and universally embraced. It's interesting to see graphics depicting the geocentric world view and also early heliocentric renderings. These were the days before NASA supplied the images of the cosmos. What you see in Alchemical Cosmography are some of the the cosmic images of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, swirled and mixed in new combinatorial art.