Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes is a book and exhibition, but it is also an ongoing project expected to last decades. That project takes the photographic work of the robotic space missions very seriously as a remarkable new chapter in the history of photography. The Kinetikon Pictures Beyond project involves curatorship (in which a continuing selection is made of the most striking images from robotic space missions) and processing (in which those pictures are carefully upgraded using the best contemporary image-processing software with the goal of producing photographic prints of an unprecedented clarity, sharpness and realism). As a final stage limited edition print runs are produced. Our eventual goal is to produce a database of the most revelatory landscape photography of the solar system even as it opens to our gaze for the first time.
To take one example of the care and attention to detail visible in these prints, whenever one of NASA’s two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are visible in NASA’s official releases, they’re always “broken” into several image fragments – an artifact of the imaging and mosaicking process. In all of our prints the rovers have been painstakingly digitally “repaired” – the result being that these cybernetic self portraits possess a previously unobtainable realism. Below is a menu of the new shots from the ongoing project.
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