Ben McCarthy
Sydney, Australia
I make interactive pieces and write essays about how astonishing the world actually is — deep time, your own atoms, the sacred hiding in the ordinary.
Most of the atoms in your body are 13.7 billion years old. The iron in your blood was forged in a star that died before the Sun was born. The calcium in your bones was made in a supernova. You are, literally, the cosmos looking at itself.
I think the real world is more astonishing than anything we could invent, and I think most people feel that too but rarely get shown it in a way that lands. So I keep building things that try.
There’s a word for seeing the world this way: Cosmism. It’s older than it sounds — Spinoza to Humboldt to Sagan — and I’m trying to give it a modern voice, one piece at a time.
This is how I see the world.
If it’s how you already see it — or how you’d like to — you belong here. I’ll send each new piece as it’s ready. No feed to keep up with; just a body of work, growing, with a note when it does.
I’ll never share your address. Leave whenever you like.