Landscape and Trajectory

If only you could see what I have seen, through your eyes.
-- ‘Replicant’ android to the human producer of his eyes
(from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner)

In the end, after the observations of the ancients and the meticulous mathematics of Kepler, after Giotto’s comet fresco and the telescopic discoveries of Galileo, after the Sputniks, the Lunar Orbiters, the Veneras, the Vikings and the handful of outer solar system probes, after aliens and sentient supercomputers and floating monoliths and escapee replicants – we have the stark surreal beauty of the spheres themselves. They’re finally real. Subject to the weather (today’s or the accretionary kind produced by eons of deep time), they move inexorably through space. Grouped in wheeling archipelagoes, or sometimes alone, but always part of a larger kinetic system ruled by the sun’s gravity and light , they’re suspended in space and time with a sublime, mysterious presence. They’re cloud-shrouded, stormy, banded, inscrutable; or unstoppably volcanic and eerily lurid in surface coloration; or ravaged by the scars of countless meteoric slings and arrows. Of the planets, most have moons; of the moons, some are bigger than planets; both moons and planets can have tenuous, or incredibly thick atmospheres, or none at all. One is frozen into a perfect cue-ball of glinting, fissured ice; another is seemingly welded together out of scraps and boulders of space-slag. Several have intricate, complex ring systems. Out there, beyond the familiar blue glow of our home world, are flickering aurorae, high-speed scudding clouds, and whirling-dervish storm systems larger than Earth. Martian dust devils trace spidery calligraphic streaks beside ridiculously grand canyons. In Jupiter’s ferociously raging cloud belts, lightening bolts zap through opaque, salmon-colored mixtures of alien atmospheric elements. At the very edge of the Solar System, geysers of sub-zero squid-ink nitrogen squirt through the intensely cold “cantaloupe” surface crust of Neptune’s weird flash-frozen moon Triton. Immense dormant volcanoes higher than two Everests rise from the deserts of Mars. On Jupiter’s crystalline moon Europa, arcuate surface cracks in the ice – fissures tugged into wave-form-like chains, each crescent-with-crescendo shaped according to the shifting tidal pull of Jupiter’s powerful gravity field – give clear credence to theories of a subsurface liquid water ocean. Inside Europa’s orbit, another Jovian moon, Io, flickers in the dark of its parent planet’s shadow with a psychedelic, lava-lamp glow. The most volcanic object in known space, Io continuously shoots magma hundreds of miles into space, its odd-ball energies fuelled by interactions with Jupiter and the gravitational counter-tug of three large sister moons.

Meanwhile stunning Saturn, twice as far from the sun as Jupiter, hangs improbably in space. Its ravishing rings hover like the embodiment of a science fiction dream. And back in the inner Solar System, the Red Planet periodically turns into a smoky brown ball as one in an endless seasonal series of global dust-storms obscures the Martian deserts from view…

It’s a measure of exactly where our species stands, both in history and on evolution’s time-line, that art historian Simon Schama could point out, in a magisterial, brick-thick book called “Landscape and Memory,” that virtually all landscapes – no matter how seemingly untamed their terrain – inevitably betray evidence of human influence. The word landscape itself entered the English language, Schama writes, “along with herring and bleached linen, as a Dutch import at the end of the 16th century.” In its Dutch meaning the term designated “a unit of human occupation, indeed jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction.” At least within the Dutch context, the latter when depicted almost inevitably revealed a tamed, table-flat topography within its pigments, wood-cut ink or etched lines. Holland is one of the best examples of human control of nature in existence. But Schama points out that even a seemingly opposite landscape to one within a European continent ordered by the human hand for millennia – that of the American West, for example – couldn’t fail to reveal, not just the inevitable mark of the artist, but also an unquantifiable number of other human alterations and revisions. Before we used canvas, in other words, we worked directly on the land itself. Yosemite National Park, to take only one example (itself separated out and “framed” by congressional decree) was depicted by artists such as the painter Albert Bierstadt and photographers Carl Watkins and Ansel Adams as the epitome of untrammeled nature. And yet, says Schama, “The brilliant meadow-floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden, was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants.”

The only images in this book that stand a chance of meeting the Dutch definition of landscape are in the first section, which examines the Earth-Moon system. And even there one has to know exactly where to look, and what for, to discern the effects of civilization on the ground and seas from which it arose. Only one picture in these pages was actually recorded directly by a human being. The photograph on the left was taken through the reinforced window of a pressurized spacecraft cabin, the black and white film stock within the Hasselblad camera exposed to light by the sudden finger-pressure of a member of the three-person crew of Apollo 15 as it returned from the Moon in 1970. It’s a profoundly honest picture. The crescent Earth is revealed as being in direct thrall to the nearby star which provides it, not only with the heat and light that fosters most (but not all ) life, but also with the powerful gravitational link that ultimately binds all the planets and moons to the sun’s nuclear furnace. That sunbeam cutting across the planet may have been a fortuitously positioned, accidental byproduct of the camera’s optics, but it has the virtue of making our situation crystal clear. Just slightly under half of all the landscapes ever conceived by the human eye (and altered by the human hand) were created on the side of that sphere facing the camera. Just under half were made on the far side. In that sense, this stunning example of black and white landscape photography contains innumerable other landscapes. It’s a summation.

But that leaves a tiny percentage. Where were they recorded? The only landscapes directly produced by human beings that didn’t originate on this planet are behind that Earth-facing Apollo capsule – on and above the surface of the moon. But even before the first Apollo trajectory around our satellite in December 1968, robot craft from Earth conducted surveys of its ravaged surface. This book for the first time presents digitally “de-striped” images from the extremely high resolution results of the five mid-60’s Lunar Orbiters – spacecraft that actually processed 70mm film on-board, before scanning and beaming the results home line by line.

The “beyond” referred to by the title has its various meanings – maybe even some on cards held too close to the chest. What are we really “beyond” here? The Earth, its branching root systems and restless seas, our own flesh and blood, the pulse of organic life? Well, yes, yes, and yes – provisionally. Because apart from that Apollonian Earth, all of these pictures were taken by space probes of one description or the other. At the end of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, the returnee ‘replicant’ quoted at the top of this introduction comes out with a final soliloquy before dying. “I have seen things you men would not believe,” he says. But in a twist on that film, we in fact can see what our robots have seen, using the eyes we’ve crafted for them. In a sense then, with this book we’re a ghost in their machinery (and riding along with what may be a gradually emerging post-human consciousness – but more on that later.) Despite this, at the most basic level we’re beyond direct human perception here – even if the fascinatingly intricate clock-work machinery that produced these landscapes, and the reason why it could be assembled and launched in the first place, comes directly from centuries of painstakingly amassed human knowledge.

And to return to the Dutch for a minute, although our robot scouts and the pictures they send back are the result of human curiosity, only a very few of these vistas reveal any impact by tools originating from this planet. The solar system objects visible here are about as untouched as they could still be while having been recorded in the first place. Setting aside the moon, only three planets have actually been impacted by automated explorers from this planet – Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. And even the robot landings on Mars and Venus conducted by the American and Russian space programs only resulted in the faintest of rude gouges, and in a few cases tire track marks, in that unearthly terrain. One time, and in one place only, a set of wheel tracks so small as to seem those of a child’s toy were etched, and then only momentarily, on the shifting sands of the Martian desert. One time, and for a fleeting 30 minutes, an atmospheric probe descended through Jupiter’s staggered cloud-belts. So there really are new things under the sun – even if they’re really as old as the Solar System and stars (currently more than ten and less than twenty billion years ). They’re new, in any case, to us.

And the “removed” quality of these photographs – that sense of their being “songs sung beyond mankind,” as the epigraph of this puts it – is matched by the circumstances of their photographers. Once released from the grip of Earth’s gravity and embarked on their trajectories, these robots can still be controlled with remarkable accuracy from Earth. But the exact positioning of their cameras is subject to more than enough error and indigenous circumstance that the actual framing of their pictures originates more with the probes themselves than with their distant controllers. The amount of time it takes for a round-trip signal to span the gap between the Earth and Jupiter, or even relatively nearby Mars, makes it impossible for ground controllers to exert the direct camera shutter control of the Apollo astronauts. So even if their specific targets were in many cases chosen for them, the photographs in this book are by the probes themselves. We’re witnessing the birth of the post-human eye.

This uncanny but very real sense of non-human authorship can trigger an almost hair-raising sensation of supreme objectivity – of the miraculous achievement of a “God’s eye view.” While helped readily along by the usually Olympian altitude of their gaze, the feeling’s also intangibly present in the comparative handful of shots from planet surfaces. There’s an intriguing spin on one of James Joyce’s clearest definitions of art in all this. In “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,” Joyce has his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus say that the greatest art can only come about when the artist’s personality “finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak… The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

While skeptics might say that the reason an artist is invisible in these images has something to do with the absence of an artist in the first place, I would submit that the evidence of the pictures themselves manages to undercut that stance. And although they’ve never been fire-cleared by the Ahwahneechee Indians, let alone tamed by Dutch engineers, the fact that these landscapes have had a perceiver designed by humans and originating from Earth already brings with it a set of sometimes paradoxical pre-suppositions. [expand on this?] When it comes to the landscape tradition, it can be hard to look at these unprecedented images with “new” eyes – even if the optical systems that first viewed many of them came out of the lab within the last decade. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A couple years before starting work on this book, for example, I was so impressed by a particularly ‘painterly’ photograph of Jupiter that I printed out a high resolution copy of it, went to the Sunday flea market in the Central European city I currently call home, found the right-size antique gilded frame, and hung it on my dining room wall. “Landscape by Cassini” was produced by the large Saturn-bound Cassini probe, itself named after 17th century astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini. The latter discovered the “Cassini division,” a gap in Saturn’s rings; the former took the picture while passing Jupiter on January 1st, 2001. (It’s also on the cover of this book.) I realized while hunting for that frame that I was playing something more than just a modest game of conceptual tag with questions of authorship and genre. I was also trying to “reframe” a question, so to speak, and in retrospect, to set the ground-work for this book. Among other things, that gilded Hapsburg-era frame with its timeless (but also in the human context very contemporary) contents continues to remind me, every day at breakfast, that the visual language of the probes fits within a long tradition, and that art and science are much closer together than we generally suppose.

It also says, at least to me, that if the photography of the probes hasn’t necessarily been perceived as being part of the history of photography, or of the landscape in general, it’s certainly not due to the innate aesthetic qualities of the landscapes themselves. Mostly it’s because of their method of production, which muddles questions of authorship and in any case is seen as being a by-product of a scientific, not artistic, quest. It’s a NASA thing, a space program thing: white coats, tracking stations, calculators, count-downs. We’re pretty far, in other words, from the paint-stained artist out among the roiled cypresses. And yet the distinction between the scientist and artist is much more recent than is generally recognized, as is a distinction between these related pursuits. During the Renaissance little difference existed: Leonardo’s scrutinizing eye teased out the inner structures of nature in order to understand and portray them better. That visual portrayal – the “portrait” – was as much a part and product of a peerless “scientific” understanding as the reverse: it produced it and was produced by it, in fact they were the same. The weathered crags behind Mona Lisa’s cryptic smile exhibit the specific topography of our planet circa 1506, providing with their texture and lighting more than enough evidence of geological history to position our sphere exactly where it belongs within the Solar System: among the inner circle of the “terrestrial” planets – the ones huddled around the sun like pilgrims around a campfire.

Probably a better example came two hundred years before Leonardo, with the first known accurate depiction of a comet. Instead of film, or the light gathering pixel-carpet of a contemporary CCD chip, the emulsion used to record the 1301 passage through the solar system of Halley’s Comet was wet plaster and paint. In Giotto di Bondone’s amazing Adoration of the Magi, Halley’s plays the role of the Star of Bethlehem; Giotto saw the comet in all its fuming glory the same year he was commissioned to paint the Scrovegni family’s private chapel in Padua, and the linked events eventually helped to build that city’s formidable reputation in the history of astronomy. (Other key elements of that history are visible within a few blocks of Giotto’s comet fresco – including the huge astrological clock at the Piazza di Signori, which has the earth at the center and the sun circling it, and Galileo’s “chair” in astronomy. Worm-eaten and unexpectedly massive, it’s more of a pulpit, appropriately enough, and is preserved in a place of honor at Italy’s second-oldest university. Galileo conducted the first telescopic observations of the cosmos from Padua in January of 1610.)

This Northern Italian confluence of the fresco, the art of the astrological clockmaker, and the first technology-assisted visual astronomy is pure Renaissance. As the art historian-astronomer team of Roberta Olson and Jay Pasachof pointed out in a paper delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Padua:

To early Renaissance minds, art and astronomy were not the strange handmaidens they seem today on the cusp of the millennium. At the time, astronomy, partially encased in the cocoon of astrology, was a liberal art, while painting was beginning its ascent into the liberal arts. Both were, therefore, part of the humanist movement, which emphasized people and this world instead of the divine and an afterlife. This celebration of Nature and the investigation of natural phenomena marks the beginning of the modern age.

As Giotto’s rendition of Halley’ Comet illustrates, it was the human eye and the computational abilities of the human brain that were our chief research tools long before Galileo’s telescope and the battalion of scopes and scanners deployed by 20th and 21st century science. The space probes belong to an extended family of scientific machines that have revealed an infinity in both directions – from the macro- to the microcosmic – and that originate partially with the intelligence of the Renaissance eye-brain combination, and with its emerging ideology emphasizing vision and understanding.

Still, it would be a mistake to root the art and science of the probes exclusively in Renaissance soil and leave it at that. It took a recent visit to distinguished space visionary Arthur C. Clarke, who gives every sign of being immortal, for me to learn of the so-called “Antikythera mechanism.” Discovered in a wreck off the southern Greek island of Antikythera, this direct ancestor of the mechanical clock – and by extension, of all contemporary scientific equipment – dates back to about 76 BC. Clarke, who has always been fascinated by ancient astronomy, told me that he had seen to it that an article by British physicist and science historian Derik de Sola Price about the Antikythera mechanism was published in Scientific American in June of 1959.

The story of the recovery of this device reads not unlike a vintage slice of sci-fi. In 1900 a shaken Greek sponge diver by the name of Elias Stadiatos was winched back into his vessel white with fear under his face-plate after having spotted a “heap of naked women” in the murky depths. He had discovered an ancient wreck directly below his own ship – the remains of a vessel that had most likely set out from nearby Rhodes, almost two thousand years earlier, with the intention of delivering its glittering cargo to a wealthy Roman buyer. The women were life-sized statues, and among the jewelry, statues, tableware, and other similarly recognizable goods stacked within the treasure ship’s bones lay a small pile of rapidly deteriorating wood and corrosion surrounding “what looked like some kind of gearing.” Recovered along with the rest of the trove on behalf of the Greek government, it was largely ignored in the face of the much more recognizable objects that surrounded it. Deposited in the Greek National Archeological Museum in Athens, where its dehydrated wood parts turned to dust, it remained there through multiple researchers and five decades before de Sola Price conducted an exhaustive study of it. His conclusion was that the Antikythera mechanism was “the most complex scientific object that has been preserved from antiquity.”

Originally supposed to be some kind of early astrolabe, or device used for maritime navigation, the mechanism was revealed to be far more sophisticated than that after careful photographic (and also linguistic) examination. Consisting “of a box with dials on the outside and a very complex assembly of gear wheels mounted within,” and containing fragments of inscriptions similar to that found in the surviving work of Rhodes astronomer Geminus, the Antikythera mechanism “must have resembled a well-made 18th century clock,” de Sola Price wrote. If true, this was already more than enough to force a total re-appraisal of the technological abilities of the ancients and confound every historian on the planet. But then came his most startling conclusion: that the gear wheels found by Captain Kondos’s sponge divers were in fact the remains of a highly accurate hand-cranked mechanical computer capable of predicting the exact motions of the planets known to the Greeks – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. According to naval historian Rob S. Rice, its “calibrated differential gears” were also “inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year.” Further, the fragmentary inscriptions on the device and its evident mechanization of the cyclical relations of the spheres made it clear that it was designed to function according to “the sidereal, synodic and draconitic months,” de Sola Price wrote:

[Similar cycles were known for the planetary phenomena; in fact, this type of arithmetical theory is the central theme of Seleucid Babylonian astronomy, which was transmitted to the Hellenistic world in the last few centuries B.C. Such arithmetical schemes are quite distinct from the geometrical theory of circles and epicycles in astronomy, which seems to have been essentially Greek. The two types of theory were unified and brought to their peak in the second century A.D. by Claudius Ptolemy, whose labors marked the triumph of the new mathematical attitude toward geometrical models that still characterizes physics today. The Antikythera mechanism must therefore be an arithmetical counterpart of the much more familiar geometrical models of the solar system which were known to Plato and Archimedes and evolved into the orrery and the planetarium."]

Setting aside the subsequent historian’s debate over the object, in which many claimed that it must be a hoax, because no other examples of such sophisticated ancient devices had been recovered, or even recorded in original texts (claims convincingly refuted in discussions outside the scope of this introduction ), there remains one of de Sola Price’s most fascinating observations:

[It is to the prehistory of the mechanical clock that we must look for important analogies to the Antikythera mechanism and for an assessment of its significance. Unlike other mechanical devices, the clock did not evolve from the simple to the complex. The oldest clocks of which we are well informed were the most complicated. All the evidence points to the fact that the clock started as an astronomical showpiece that happened also to indicate the time. Gradually the timekeeping functions became more important and the device that showed the marvelous clockwork of the heavens became subsidiary. Behind the astronomical clocks of the 14th century there stretches an unbroken sequence of mechanical models of astronomical theory. At the head of this sequence is the Antikythera mechanism. Following it are instruments and clocklike computers known from Islam, from China and India and from the European Middle Ages. The importance of this line is very great, because it was the tradition of clock-making that preserved most of man's skill in scientific fine mechanics. During the Renaissance the scientific instrument-makers evolved from the clockmakers. Thus the Antikythera mechanism is, in a way, the venerable progenitor of all our present plethora of scientific hardware.]

In other words, we owe our ability to create the tools we are currently using to explore the solar system to the skills and knowledge developed over millennia in order to simulate celestial and planetary motion! From the clockwork stars and planets, to the real ones, in a trajectory spanning most of human knowledge. And de Sola Price’s demonstration that the mathematical theory underpinning the Antikythera mechanism stems from Babylonian astronomy truly links the alpha to the omega – the technology of the civilization that created the wheel with that of the probes, probably the most sophisticated mechanical devices ever assembled. As the great investigator of archetypal mythologies Joseph Campbell notes in his book “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space”:

[A decisive, enormous leap out of the confines of all local histories and landscapes occurred in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC, during the period of the rise of the ziggurats, those storied temple towers, symbolic of the axis mundi, which are caricatured in the Bible as the Tower of Babel. The leap was from geography to the cosmos, beyond the moon… That was the period when writing was invented; also, mathematical measurement, and the wheel. The priestly watchers of the night skies at that time were the first in the world to recognize that there is a mathematical regularity in the celestial passages of the seven visible spheres… And with that, the idea dawned of a cosmic order, mathematically discoverable, which it should be the function of a governing priesthood to translate from its heavenly revelation into an order of civilized human life.]

Needless to say, it was the latter part of that extended jump from terrestrial geography to the cosmos that ultimately revealed the wider continuum of landscapes which this book samples a very small part of. The ziggurats may have given way to launch towers, and Mesopotamia’s priesthood today comes equipped with degrees in astrophysics and celestial mechanics, but many of the particulars remains surprisingly similar. And Campbell’s leap may have been “decisive” and “enormous,” but it remains incomplete. At the start of a century that has already revealed not history’s end but a depressingly full plate of the stuff, this book seeks to remind of the lure of the pristine beyond. Is it possible that a look at these silent spheres might, in a small way, help bring some objectivity to our perception of ourselves, and of our position in space and time? Campbell again:

[(T)he effect upon the world today of the preponderance in the popular mind of journalistic sociopolitical didactic laced with pornographic entertainment (expiring Rome’s “bread and circuses,” panem et circenses), has been to release over the planet in this century the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:1-7). What thunderblast of the spirit must be launched to blow this multi-headed Lord of the Century to smithereens? The blast will not make a lot of noise, nor will it break upon us all at once. In fact, the conditions for its coming are already here. As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps.]

We live at a time of unprecedented image saturation. To list the various media that ceaselessly flood our senses with electronic or other kinds of visual messages quickly gets tired. Where’s the Ararat in all this? These photographs from the most distant edges of the solar system reveal topographies extremely remote from human concerns. They exist well above the flood; in fact they’re from another region entirely. And the probes are something like Noah’s doves, bringing back evidence that dry land has emerged, clean and wild and lit by the sun, from the wine-dark waves of space and time.

So not surprisingly, given the above, a number of principles once held to be self-evident have to be abandoned when viewing them. To take only one example, along with its emphasis on a study of natural form the Renaissance devised a method for organizing objects in space entirely reliant on the existence of a straight horizon – on the visual illusion of a boundary from which invisible lines of perspective radiate. But this is a lie, even if it seeks to tell the truth. This planetary-surface-based reliance on a horizon, and our vertical position in relation to it, was blown wide open by the first forays into space. As theorist Paul Virilio has pointed out, “the entire history of Quattrocento perspective is only ever the story of struggle, of the battle of geometers vying to make us forget the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ by pushing the ‘near’ and the ‘far,’ a vanishing point that literally fascinated them, even though our vision is actually determined by our weight and oriented by the pull of earth’s gravity, by the classic distinction between zenith and nadir.” To put it another way, our ant-like perceptions about how matter is organized has been usurped by another truth: that we’re glued to this globe by an inexplicable power, and are whizzing through space due to forces scarcely less mysterious. The view from orbit frequently omits the horizon altogether: instead we get an eagle-eyed look straight down. And when we see the horizon, it’s a curving limb, a segment of a planetary body molded into a sphere by the force of gravity. This is no lie telling the truth – it’s the truth, telling the truth. And it requires a new understanding of the meaning of landscape.

A great example of shifting traditional perspectives while still making them conform to our ingrained ground-level viewpoint is already visible in the very first picture of the Earth rising over the moon. This isn’t that famous shot taken by the Apollo-8 astronauts in 1968, rather it’s a mosaic of image strips beamed to Earth from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966 (see page X). Although NASA had the option of releasing this picture in whatever orientation it chose, given that it originated in a weightless void, it was of course presented so that the lunar horizon cuts across the image’s lower half – a traditional position, even if of a spectacularly untraditional subject. And the home planet rises majestically beyond that irregular, crater-scarred line.

But close study reveals that this quite conventional presentation of the unconventional grows unorthodox in the details. It’s true that, as Campbell points out, no borders are visible. But apart from that, the very orientation of the home planet is at variance with how we usually see it. The terminator line, that boundary between the day and night sides of Earth, is horizontal in the picture – the better to mimic our traditional perspective. So the moon here plays the Earth’s role, and the Earth is transformed into a moon, rising – an arrangement that gives us the spectacle of the home planet on its side, with the equator reaching from the top to the bottom of the terrestrial sphere. The source of light for the image, meanwhile, is high above, a place where we traditionally hang it – rather than along the horizontal plane of the Solar System, where it would implicitly be positioned if we were studying a school-room globe of Earth. Hiding within conventionality, in other words, is that revision of the conventional that space travel demands. Hiding in plain sight.

Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the fact that the pictures in this book were taken by sophisticated descendants of the Antikythera mechanism tends to remove them from traditional categorization as “art” – at least in certain stages of the evolution that word. In a film I’m working on called “More Places Forever,” a scene was shot linking one of Edward Muybridge’s proto-cinematic motion studies – in this case of a horse running – with an Earth departure sequence by the NEAR space probe (and an older Mariner approach sequence to the planet Mars). Two framed pictures, each with multiple windows within, were simultaneously animated, so that Muybridge’s white horse gallops in a silent loop on the left side of the frame, and the Earth departure and Mars arrival play themselves out on the right. This idea was the result of a perception that the methodical frame-frame-frame progression of the probes through space is very analogous to Muybridge’s motion studies. In either case, if you speed them up, you get a movie.

But it wasn’t until I had an intriguing e-mail exchange with Ben Charland, a researcher at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, that I became aware that the linkage made in the scene also corresponds to the methodology used in both cases. This is because, as Charland points out, direct human agency is removed from the production of the image. Responding to my assertion that space probe images haven’t yet really been understood as art, Charland wrote:

[You mentioned another hesitation or source of resistance as being “the robotic nature of the camera platforms.” I haven't thought much about this but the work of Harold (Doc) Edgerton as well as the work of Eadweard Muybridge may contain parallel issues. In both cases, those photographers used mechanisms that, while not robotic, allowed them to essentially make images hands free. Edgerton used audio sensors to trip high-speed strobes and shutters allowing him to photographs speeding bullets and exploding balloons, and I can't help but think of Muybridge's use of an electro-photographic system that employed strings draped in front of galloping horses to trip his shutters. Both systems eliminated the notion of the photographer in the sense of someone choosing a decisive moment and thus the frame's contents. If it is arguable that these artists enjoy a place in photographic history simply for their contributions to the technology of the medium than I think the same could be said of the space probe images.]

Of course, the beauty of Muybridge’s galloping horses wouldn’t exist for us to see without the hands-off technology he devised – and his place in the history of photography surely owes a lot to that beauty. And likewise with the probe pictures, even if they still – for now, anyway – require a human curator. (Charland, who obviously hadn’t known about the linkage between Muybridge’s images and space probe photography in my unreleased film, also pointed out that there are countless recent manifestations of a contemporary trend in which science and art are returning into close orbit.)

All this could be interpreted as calling into question whether the “beyond” can really be reached. Where do we place that threshold? The developmental chain running straight from the earliest known animal “motion studies” (the extraordinarily kinetic stone-age ones preserved in the Chauvet cave in France, for example) to the Babylonian invention of the wheel and mathematical astronomy, to the Antikythera mechanism, onwards to the orrery and clock, then to Muybridge’s cameras – which inherited that technological finesse – and finally the space probes, links these robotic visions to the past in a kind of image-based umbilical cord leading inevitably back to our blue-white home planet. It also presents a fascinating parallel question. Are we talking about a type of Darwinian evolution here – a machine evolution fostered by our own?

In the greatest science fiction movie of all time, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the murderously sentient supercomputer HAL informs the last human survivor of the crew of a spacecraft bound for Jupiter that “this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.” And yet the astronaut wins in the end, de-programming the computer, continuing onwards to Jupiter, and experiencing a kind of immaculate re-birth as a “Star Child.” True to the title, he then returns home to orbit the Earth – something that the probes rarely do. So the “beyond” in 2001 involves a next step in human, not machine evolution. But one possibility suggested by this book is that the machines themselves may constitute that next evolutionary step. Not a particularly original idea, but in this case one illustrated by the actual achievements of the new mechanical “species.”

Still, doubters will point out that we shouldn’t overestimate how far past human sensibilities the probes have so far gone. (That physically they’ve overshot our organic selves is without question, unless you’re the kind of person who believes that Apollo 11 landed in a Hollywood sound-stage.) Werner Heisenberg wrote that “What we see is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” You could say that the probes, with their hardened metal shells and their computer brains, aren’t yet the question, a la HAL and Blade Runner’s replicants. They’re still the method we’re using to ask it. Citing Magritte’s painting “The Human Condition,” which depicts a canvas on an aisle standing next to an open window, with the landscape viewed from the window and its representation on the canvas merging into a seamless continuity, Simon Schama quotes the Belgian painter: “This is how we see the world. We see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside.”

When it comes to the visions of space offered up by the interplanetary probes and the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, this presents a fascinating, potentially embolismic prospect: that this immensity also exists within us. The view out, in other words, flips, becoming a look inside. In that sense, the probes are our mirrors, our way to look at ourselves. Here’s Tatyana Tolstaya, writing recently about Andrei Platonov:

[The world of Platonov’s characters is a cosmic world, the world before (or simultaneous with) the appearance of God the Creator; the world of the soul, which seems to exist parallel with the Creator; the world of the spirit, which in some sense (for example in stubbornness and willpower) is equal to the Creator. The universe, as we know it, with its gravitation, molecules, hellish radiation, planets forming from lumps of star dust, and the blinding flash of suns burning at millions of degrees – this universe, according to Platonov, is in a state of constant becoming within each human soul.]

But how comes it there, to become? How do we know the universe is this way, and not another? Through the agency of our superb machines, of course. And this opens the door to a series of unavoidable realizations. One is that we can’t avoid bringing ourselves into the picture, because we’re a part of it. (The decision to include the Earth in this book was very deliberate.) This isn’t an either-or question, in other words, it’s more dialectical than that. If the view out becomes a view inside, it’s not even necessary to understand them as two kinds of view: it’s the same view. The extended, assisted reach of our vision positions us with ever more precision in a vast echoing space – a space filled with more spheres, stars, and mysterious spinning galaxies than could ever fit on Merlin’s hat. And yet they could fit in his imagination, and in ours as well.

Because in the end, there’s no still point to the turning world, and the only center to the universe is the brain of the individual, protected by its bony cover, and closely accompanied and supplied with information by five hyperactive sense organs. If these have more recently been supplemented with others, and extended outwards cybernetically, the principle remains. And we continue to live in the nutshell of our skulls, and in the equally fragile terrarium of our planet. Even if we can’t yet count ourselves kings of infinite space, we can observe it, and try to understand it, and perceive ourselves as being a part of it. So, as Timothy Ferris concludes in the conclusion to his recent book on amateur astronomy, “while life is in us, and we are in it, let’s keep our eyes open.”

But why should we? Just why is it that we human beings are capable of perceiving beauty in a landscape, or anywhere else, in the first place? Is it really necessary, or is it a kind of extra bonus to our existence? The strawberry on the evolutionary cake? Setting aside for the moment why it’s possible with extraterrestrial landscapes, why should this even be the case on Earth? In an essay titled “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez also speaks of a mirroring of the exterior with the interior within Navajo ritual – “a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape.” Among the Navajo, Lopez says, it’s evident that the “sacred order” of the land must be incorporated within each individual in order to achieve a “balanced state of mental health.”

And Timothy Ferris makes a similar point. Rejecting the theological idea that our ability to perceive natural beauty is a result of its affiliations with “the good” and results from God’s “authorship of the world,” he also exposes as flawed logic the circular Keatsian idea that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Instead, Ferris argues, the human capability to perceive and take pleasure in natural beauty seems to fit most readily with principles of natural selection. “Briefly put, the argument is that the likelihood of our ancestors surviving to puberty and having children was influenced to some degree by the extent to which they actually liked it here on Earth,” he writes, and goes on to speculate about an “evolution of a nature aesthetic” involving “a wider range of interactions between our ancestors and the natural world than the data of human history yet permits us to reconstruct.”

Applying both Lopez’s view on the Navajo and Ferris’s adaptation of Darwin, it’s easy to see how our innate ability to perceive natural beauty on this planet – and so to flourish here – might apply equally well to spheres that have only been wandering specks in the night sky for most of human existence. And in that case, it could be that this beauty is more of a lure. Are the visions of the probes a kind of signpost to the new spaces in which a continuing evolution might play itself out? If these planets and stars, in all their distant inscrutability, already played a major role in human development, then they are certainly capable of expanding on that role now that we can see them with clarity. That vast expanse of void, studded with jewel-like planets and stars, is only now revealing itself as potentially open to us, and not only to the increasingly autonomous devices that have risen from our workshops. And if one supposes a next phase of evolution in this great expanse, then it becomes clear that the aesthetic appreciation we find there may exist for exactly the same reasons that Ferris and Lopez identify: to produce a harmony of the exterior and the interior landscapes. To expand the interior in response to new information. And just maybe, to complete the great leap from what Arthur Clarke has called “the sea of salt” to “the sea of stars.”

If that’s true, one of the biggest questions we now face is if we will ever follow our machines. Will they be the only ones to carry glittery sparks of Earthly intelligence to the stars? And interestingly enough, the answer to that may hinge on whether or not we discover life already out there. Because there’s another way in which the subjects of these pictures and their recorders seem matched. Although we don’t yet know, most of these solar system landscapes seem to be well beyond the realm of organic life. Take, for example the awesome Martian grand canyon, Vallis Marinaris, which is named after Mariner 9, the probe that discovered it in 1972. Although it bears an eerie resemblance to a similar canyon fissuring Arizona, hopes that some primitive form of cactus might exist, or even microbial life, clinging to the red soil somewhere in all that immensity, were largely punctured after the arrival of the twin Viking Landers in 1976. But despite their soil tests, which were intended to prove the matter once and for all and which came up negative, we still can’t say for sure. Mars remains one of the leading potential homes for off-Earth life in the Solar System. (In another essay Barry Lopez pointed out that a Viking Lander deployed in one of Antarctica’s remote “dry valleys” would also have failed to find life – though it’s there, hidden deep in the cracked rock. )

This “to be or not to be” question cuts directly to the heart of the whole ongoing deep space endeavor, of course. As someone once pointed out, either life is out there somewhere, or it is not – and either way the answer would be equally astonishing. Much further than Antarctica, or freezing Mars from the roaring sun, once thought to be the only solar system object capable of creating the heat necessary for life, a kind of miniature model of the greater Solar System rotates.

T.S. Eliot famously suggested that the end of “all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” But unlike Odysseus, or his descendant, the Star Child of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the probes never really return. And we, it seems, never really leave – either temporarily or for keeps. In between the impenetrable walls of our mortality, we receive signals from the larger spaces beyond, be they the lights hanging in the sky familiar to the ancients, or our contemporary digitized vision-streams. Yet there’s no paradox in Eliot’s formulation, because both the departure and the return – of self or of signal – take place within a single unified space. It’s just that that space has expanded, in both its dimensions and its complexity, because of the exchange. (It has in fact been revealed to be one space through that exchange.) Where we started, in other words, was a place we thought we knew and didn’t, and all of our exploring reveals the vast dimensions of it; and it is rather an infinite compendium of linked places than a single one. A “more places forever.”

So are we “beyond” anything, apart from our prior notions of just where we stand? And if only this, is it enough? If the probes may be at the very beginning of a long evolution, one that might eventually elide organic mortality altogether, what about us? Will we ever build crewed star-ships, or even inter-planetary ones, and “boldly go where no one has gone before” – one of these decades? And should we even care, given that the mechanical fruits of a genius accumulated through the millennia are proceeding in that direction – slipping the bonds of Earth and rising into a kind of extended extraterrestrial Garden? An Eden never once fire-cleared by the Ahwahneechee Indians?

While it’s hard to answer these questions, maybe some solace is given (or is that more of a kick in the pants?) by an image taken by Voyager-1 in 1991. The comparatively unknown black and white photograph that started this introduction was taken by a person in a capsule returning to the home planet, and is part of a photographic record revealing humanity’s radically revised perspective on itself at the dawn of the Space Age. The color one on the next page was taken from 4 billion miles further away, by a machine from the Earth as it departed the Solar System – the third object from here ever to leave on a trajectory to the stars. The Earth as a “pale blue dot” was a picture suggested and subsequently made famous by Carl Sagan. Despite their radically different perspectives and methods of production, these two images exhibit the same uncanny phenomenon. In the Apollo one, a sunbeam floats across that central sphere which is both the birthplace of the human race and of all currently known life. In the Voyager shot, that same place – now a tiny receding dust mote, a single blue pixel in a vast field – floats within a spoke of sunlight that dwarfs it.

In both cases, the Earth’s existence as a satellite of its closest star is made explicit. Even if that shimmering line of solar power is an accidental byproduct of the effects of sunlight on the lens in both shots, it reveals a true relationship. In the end it’s probably not so surprising that two very different photographers took such similar (and similarly beautiful) pictures. After all, both originated on Earth, and both were recording the point of their origins. Finally our robot descendants, our organic flesh-and-blood selves, and the subject of these two photographs are three very different, yet seamlessly connected, types of spacecraft. From mother nature, to human intelligence, to the far-flung recording eye of the robot explorers. And as for the images themselves, maybe Saul Steinberg said it best. “The reflection in itself is a second-degree reality, because it is not real but only produced by the real object,” he wrote. “These reflections enchant me by the strangeness of their existence (strangeness is a quality of miracles).”

And that strangeness, of course, extends to the fact of a perceiver in the first place. Be it a human being or one of our cybernetic successors far from the Earth, the existence of the beholding eye is the first miracle, producing all the others. The planets and stars on Merlin’s hat, in other words, have slipped from there into your head – that nutshell capable of containing a universe. In that sense the true miracle is you, hypocrite lecteur, the turner of these pages. You and the probes.

Michael Benson
Kinetikon Pictures
Ljubljana, Slovenia
May 25, 2003