Each time the date shifts us into a new zodiac, Aliina Kauranne releases an animation reflecting that sign. Each piece is like a living playing card for a sign, a “choose your fighter” character rotating in space, retro graphics flickering around the screen like an 80s arcade video game. She tells Hannah Ewens why people seek comfort and clarity in the stars, and why creating something that celebrates the good in each sign was so important to her.
On a day when the stars perfectly aligned, Aliina Kauranne was gifted an astrology book by her mother. It had been a cherished possession of hers and her friends in the 80s, carried everywhere as a kind of conversational oracle: were all Leos prone to cultivating that thick, dramatic mane? Could a Scorpio’s repeated appetite for revenge really be down to their intense ruling planet of Pluto? Was it remotely healthy that their Capricorn acquaintance’s obsession with their career never seemed to let up?
In difficult times people tend to reach out to religion and find comfort there, and with zodiacs it’s the same.
Lars Johansson’s “Astrologian Maailma”—“The World of Astrology”—is long out of print but Kauranne still keeps her copy, its back pages filled with handwritten names and birth times. “For years I’ve been reading through it and finding traits or characteristics that match my friends and people around me,” the Finnish artist tells me of her original portal into mysticism. “It’s very 80s in its delivery, with diet suggestions and some other slightly toxic things, but still many things feel very accurate.”
It’s natural that as Kauranne’s artistic practice evolved, she found herself drawn by the same impulse that first led her to astrology: “I guess my work is about trying to understand the world and people, and my own place and purpose in it,” she explains. “I mostly try to illustrate a feeling or something that is hard to express in other ways: like a sense of belonging or the confusion of life.” Then again, Kauranne is a triple Sagittarius—her Sun, Moon and Rising signs are all in the famously lucky fire sign—meaning she’s inherently drawn to philosophy, religion and spirituality.
To believe in astrology is to believe that the movements of distant stars and planets might do more than just guide tides and predict eclipses. They either shape or reflect us, in an unfolding, intimate relationship with us and the planet we live on. It’s not that our fate-is-sealed by what we see in the sky. Rather, that the stars act as a map, in the way that a constellation only becomes visible when you know where to look. Astrology is ancient—more than 4,000 years old—but especially prevalent now because we’re being drawn to something ancient, something intuitive. A framework that speaks to how chaotic everything is, and offers a soft outline of order.
Long before Kauranne started her zodiac series, she knew she would make some sort of personal project on horoscopes that could potentially manifest later in a calendar or postcards. During 2024, she used her mother’s book and the Internet, from astro-sites to women’s digital media, to cross-reference information about the 12 different zodiac signs from Aries (headstrong, passionate, sometimes childish) to Pisces (sacrificial, loving, prone to escapism).
“I wanted to keep the information simple and the video format quite short, so it’s based on the sun signs,” Kauranne says of her animated zodiac artworks. “I feel it’s light and ‘accessible’ with just the basic characteristics, element, ruling planet and colors. Most people know their sun signs even if they would not think about astrology or horoscopes.”
We need answers and something to hold onto, maybe a need for an already written pattern, like, ‘This is all happening because…’
Her animations are a living, breathing Pokémon card for each zodiac sign. They crackle and fizz like an 80s arcade video game; the gorgeous “choose your fighter” girl represents Virgo or Cancer or Taurus and rotates, so viewers can witness her in her glory. An echoing voiceover explains the attributes of said sign, for instance: “Geminis are curious and versatile, always eager to learn and explore new ideas. Their social and playful nature makes them the life of the party, while their quick wit ensures engaging conversation.”
Kauranne has even made more involved break-out animations for the Full Moon in Sagittarius back in June (a futuristic but equally 80s girl jumping up and down in the middle of a spiral and pointing her face and sword aloft to a huge smiling moon) and the Full Moon lunar eclipse in September (in this one the girl is swimming in a pink luminous sea under a realistic blood red moon).
“I started by sketching the characters and possible layouts in my sketchbook, then moved into the 3D modelling process based on the sketches,” Kauranne explains of her process. “So basically I create the elements in 3D software and then put together the main artwork composition in After Effects. Audio is done with some online text to speech generator, and the music is a slightly distorted version of ‘Deja Vu’ by Mort Garson.”
The visuals and smooth plots of 80s and 90s sci-fi movies themed around dystopian virtual reality, AI and games have more recently been inspiring her: movies like “Cherry 2000” (1987), “The Lawnmower Man” (1992), “The Arcade” (1993), “eXistenZ” (1999), “The Running Man” (1987) and “Tron” (1982). “The visuals are just lovely: I love shiny chrome and glowing lights,” she says. If you’ve ever been driven through an East Asian city at night—Tokyo, maybe, or Seoul—your eyes lost in the blur of neon and motion, there’s something familiar in the way Kauranne’s shimmering universe unfolds behind her figures. Its dopamine spiking brightness somehow doesn’t demand attention so much as allow you to drift inside it, a reminder of your smallness in the vast, indifferent scheme of things.
Kauranne plans to drop one piece per month until she’s completed all the signs by February 2026. The ones she has released already remind me of finding your birth stone in a crystal shop, or watching a mood ring on your finger turn a murky mix of blues and greens and reds from the heat. Everything in Kauranne’s zodiacal world is elementally sparkling, and pings with positive energy; the more negative attributes of each sign are ignored. Only the lighter aspects appear on the artwork’s accompanying teleprompter (my sign Libra is not indecisive and people pleasing, as is often said about us, but charming and diplomatic).
This makes the animations sharable and something to celebrate. Although astrology can be used to uncover what might be darker or unpleasant about yourself or the way your life is starting to pan out, it feels warming and nostalgic to go back to basics. “In difficult times people tend to reach out to religion and find comfort there, and with zodiacs it’s the same,” considers Kauranne. “We need answers and something to hold onto, maybe a need for an already written pattern, like, ‘This is all happening because…’”
