Andromeda’s Howl is a piece of research that explore new methods in historical research as a creative practice. It traces and follows 'Andromeda' as a word, name, myth, constellation, galaxy, as frescoes, paintings, sculptures, as archetype. The project acts as a relay, connecting moments in time otherwise unrelated. Think the classical myth, along with a 19th Century sculpture at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a medieval mystic and translator of Arabic texts into Latin, glass plate photography at the Carnegie Archive in Pasadena of Edward Hubble's 'discovery' of the Andromeda galaxy, an iron forgery in Shropshire, and on and on.

Beyond stories captured in text, Andromeda’s Howl is also an 8-part song cycle, whose performance, over time, connects with, records and captures the voices of audience members, public participants, workshop attendees and more into a collective composition, a love letter to Andromeda.

Andromeda is a myth that has been a relay of oral histories, material sources, images, representations and morality. Andromeda has been papyrus paper at one point in time and an iron sculpture at another, cast by John Bell and bought by Queen Victoria at the Great Exhibition in 1851. The language, the word, the semantics and the etymology of Andromeda is like an anniversary. Each time it is repeated, it reinforces some origin.

But just what is that origin, or source, when Andromeda is a myth? And like all myths, is sourced and sourceless, save for its repetition, its relay.

The constellation Andromeda  has been drawn, configured, photographed and measured, once even by Michel Scot the 12th Century medieval scholar, appearing in Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell, and described in that text as one whose ribs are thin and small. Visible to the naked eye, the Andromeda Galaxy is a smudge, a blur, something like a cluster or cloud not dissimilar to the Great Nebula that inspired Kant’s ‘island universes’. Andromeda  has been a glass plate taken on Mount Wilson Observatory in 1923 and the classification system developed by Henrietta Swan Leavitt to look at variable stars at the Harvard College Observatory. Andromeda is also our closest neighbour, and in a cosmic love dance with us; the Milky Way and Andromeda will, after all, collide in an epic embrace in about 4.5 billion years. 

Andromeda the myth is relayed in time, through story, to us. Andromeda the galaxy is relayed in time, through space, to us. The light of it we see is already 2.5 million years old when it reaches our eye, and so acts as a perpetually updating archive, or an impossibly slow telegraph line between two galaxies. So why does it feel like this message from two and a half million years ago is really a message from the future?

Do you hear it now?

The message is one of waves.

And the wave is a song.

And the song asks for a reply.

The love letter, this two and a half million year old love letter, wants one back.

My contribution to INSAP 2024 will be a proto-academic paper, speculative fiction, and the performance of a short song from emerging song-cycle. I will employ the collective political and spiritual form of call and response, ending (hopefully) in a very short collective song.