Art Box #13: SCOPE by Quadrature

You thought you were an Aquarius. Turns out you’re Starman behind the wheel of a Tesla Roadster, perpetually lost in space. At least according to the rogue astrology of Quadrature, an artist duo who built this shiny monolith to assign you a new celestial archetype — one better suited to our turbulent Anthropocene era. In this Art Box, we crack the monolith open and see what’s really written in the stars.

A Space Junk Odyssey

A disclaimer before we go cosmic, though: no, Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch of Quadrature do not believe in astrology. “Not at all,” they tell us. What interests them is why the rest of us keep returning to it — especially when the future becomes difficult to predict — and what happens when you apply its ancient machinery of pattern-making to a sky humans have radically changed over the past 75 years. Because while we were busy blaming Mercury being in retrograde, humans were busy building a second artificial sky.

As of the end of September 2026, there are around 16,500 functioning satellites around Earth, plus thousands of dead ones, but also rocket bodies and other objects that remain in orbit — that’s according to the European Space Agency. At least 11,110 of them are Starlink satellites, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Space-surveillance networks regularly track almost 47,000 objects, while models suggest that the real number of debris pieces larger than one centimetre is already around 1.5 million.

They include everything from telecommunications and weather satellites to spy infrastructure, the International Space Station, and the occasional piece of cosmic “performance art.” Like a red Tesla.

In 2018, SpaceX needed a dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy maiden flight. Elon Musk supplied his own Tesla Roadster, installed a spacesuit-clad mannequin called Starman behind the wheel, put David Bowie on the stereo, and launched it into space. The car is still attached to the rocket’s upper stage, travelling around the Sun on an orbit that stretches beyond Mars.

If humans once looked up and saw an archer in the random clusters of stars, Quadrature wondered, why shouldn’t we look up now and see — let’s say — Starman? That’s how they came up with the concept for SCOPE — Space Craft Oracle for Personal Enlightenment.