pt/en
A text that comes apart wherever the sky passes over it. The text block is the celestial sphere seen from below: the centre is the zenith, the edge is the horizon. Every star above the horizon opens a core of dissolution in the letters beneath it. No star is ever drawn — only the deformation it causes.
The catalogue holds 22 stars with real right ascension, declination and magnitude, epoch J2000: the five of the Southern Cross, the seven of Orion, the two pointers of Centaurus and eight more scattered across the southern sky. Every frame the page turns the clock into a Julian date, the Julian date into local sidereal time for the longitude of São Paulo, and from that derives the altitude and azimuth of each one. Atmospheric extinction is included: a star rises faint and gains force as it climbs.
The sky decides where, and it is reversible — as a star climbs the letters loosen, as it sets they settle back. What decides what are the cosmic rays: real hourly counts from the Oulu neutron monitor, in Finland, measured between 22 and 23 August 2026. The last three digits of each count are Poisson noise — the part nobody can predict or plant. That noise picks one word among those the sky has made eligible, and picks its replacement from a Markov chain trained on the text itself. That substitution does not come back.
The text is the first two paragraphs of Industrial Society and Its Future (1995), by Theodore Kaczynski. A text arguing that technology disfigures the human, disfigured by cosmic-ray data and a Markov chain.
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