Register Star
Register Star is a project which began in 2014 and stems from a link between Mars and a manufacturing city in Illinois called Rockford. Once known as the “Nuts and Bolts Capital of the United States” the city produced hardware and machine tooling for industry. Within the economic shifts from material production to service and information, unemployment rates in the city have risen to amongst the highest in the country yet it continues to spread slowly outward, big box store after big box store, across the flat expanse of the rural midwest. Rockford’s former ideological and productive centerpoint, the production of physical objects (small parts for large machines), having similarly diffused into a global and post-global haze of production.
Register Star hinges on a machine shop called Forest City Gear which produced gear mechanisms for the NASA rover Curiosity amongst its other military and private defense contracts. One of Curiosity’s primary objectives was to create the first high definition photographic images of the planet. In this project I look to the ways mythology, spectacle, and labor entwine themselves with a human condition constructed largely by the advent of photography in which vision and acquisition become tightly entwined.
