An orbital détente was staged on July 17, 1975 when space craft from two nations rendezvous and docked for the first time. The American Apollo is a fat conjunction: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight. The Soviet Soyuz is a stack of discrete units, an orbiting Bolshevik bug. The craft kiss and trade saliva, teeming with astronauts.

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Wheel charts are performative ephemera. Their stacked discs suggest dynamism, even when the chart’s information is fixed and predictable. In spite of infinite symmetry, the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function. The wheel chart’s information may be rigorous and expansive; the junction of kitsch and tactility make the information digestible and portable.

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Spacecraft and wheel charts are mementos from collapse of uncertainty of the Cartesian world, be it the mastery of orbital flight or a heifer’s menstrual cycle. While the objects themselves may be immutable, the ephemeral life they lead is not.

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