One Earth Year Later
Nore Kerkhofs
Belgium
About
Nore Kerkhofs is a Belgian digital designer and artist whose work explores the relationship between science, perception, and visual representation. Working across interactive media, installation, web-based systems, and speculative interfaces, her practice investigates how complex scientific concepts—particularly those related to astronomy, scale, and cosmology—are translated into human experience.
Through research-driven design, Nore examines the gaps between scientific accuracy and public intuition, often focusing on the ways visual systems shape understanding. Her projects combine data, interaction, storytelling, and physical scenography to create immersive environments that invite audiences to experience concepts such as distance, orbital logic, and planetary scale firsthand.
Project
One Earth Year Later is an interactive installation and research project that explores how people understand astronomical scale, distance, and orbital motion. Visitors are invited to take a seat at a retro-futuristic mission control station assembled from repurposed analogue technologies, including a vintage television, radio equipment, oscilloscopes, telecommunication devices, and custom-built electronic systems. Together, these objects form a speculative control room situated somewhere between scientific laboratory, space archive, and historical fiction.
At the center of the installation is an interactive serious game framed as a Soviet-inspired space mission narrated by Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to survive orbital spaceflight. Through a series of short challenges, players are asked to launch spacecraft, compare planetary sizes, balance masses, navigate orbital systems, and safely return to Earth. Rather than presenting information through diagrams or text alone, the project uses embodied interaction, play, and physical interfaces to expose common misconceptions about the solar system.
