Animating the Cosmological Horizon
Janine Randerson
Cinematic art experiences can approximate the optical intensity of distant stars in the night sky or the powerful light of the sun. Philosopher of light Paul Virilio once described the starry sky itself as ‘never more than an illusion, since no astronomer knows if the remote source of their light still exists’ (2000, 46). From the mirage of atmospheric images produced by optical effects of light, to the frame-by-frame animation of contemporary satellite or telescopic images, this chapter will consider a body of artists’ techniques for cosmological representation. The first section focuses on experimental film-maker Jordan Belson’s radiating astronomical imagery in films such as Allures (1961), Samadhi (1967) and Momentum (1969) that grew out of the Vortex concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco in the 1950s. In the latter part of the chapter I introduce contemporary Australian artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines’ installation Earthstar (2010), an installation that includes an animation produced by a hydrogen-alpha telescope fixed on the sun; and American artists Sarah and Joseph Belknap’s animation 12 Months of the Sun (2014), which uses imagery sourced from NASA’s Space Weather Media viewer app. I position these artists as inheritors of Belson’s cosmological visual language, while examining my own artistic connection to Belson through my video installation artworks such as Report to Darmstadt (2007), Aerosphere and Atmosphere (2011) and Albedo of Clouds (2012). In each of these works I animate and reprocess remote satellite images to imagine an expansive cosmological horizon.
Virilio’s term ‘cosmological horizon’ describes the visibility cone of astronomical appearances, where light is visible even before the objects or phenomena that it illuminates (2000, 45). In Jordan Belson’s oeuvre of films in the 1960s, the cosmic illusion of the sky collides with mystic temporalities drawn from Eastern philosophy, and embodied, inner space. Today, an altered sense of space-time, combined with speed, is opened by the sharing of digital data with science in collaborative processes within artists’ experimental animation. This discussion of contemporary animated visions of the cosmos is prefaced by an historical reflection on intersections between scientific apparatuses for sequential recordings of the sun. Galileo Galilei, for instance, developed a method of projecting the sun’s image via a telescope to draw the sun’s path at approximately the same time of the day; these early experiments are positioned here as a speculative forerunner to one-stop animation.
The naked eye, historical apparatus and our closest star
The sun’s searing light harms the naked human eye, so we always approach our closest star obliquely through instruments and imagination. A deeper history of solar imaging and projection are situated here as precursors (in spirit) to the digital animation of solar bodies by contemporary artists. The basic principles for harnessing the sun through a pin hole camera obscura device were first recorded in China in the fifth century BC by philosopher Mo-Ti. Meanwhile in Greece, Aristotle investigated the nature of sunlight in his natural philosophy. In Book XV, Aristotle describes how he uses his own hands and available material to study the sun. He ruminates, ‘Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth?’ (Hammond 1981, 5). The sun is a projected light source that is animated by his hands. The human body therefore becomes an embedded part of the solar viewing apparatus, breaking down the distinction between instrument and phenomena, subject and object and the ‘knower and the known’ phenomena (Barad 2007, 138).
In the European Renaissance, entire architectures became apparatuses for projecting the sun and allowing a solar image to form. In 1475 the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli placed a bronze ring with an aperture in the window in the cupola of the Duomo in Florence. Intense sunlight through the hole allowed a solar image to form on the cathedral’s floor. At noon, the solar image bisected a ‘noon-mark’ on the floor to mark the time (Renner 1995, 6). The changing light of the projected sun over time allowed the viewer a new closeness to this distant body. By 1611, German scientist Christoph Scheiner invented the heliotropii telioscopici (heliscope) with coloured lenses to view the various faces of the sun (Reeves 2010). While Scheiner pre-dated Galileo’s recorded observations of sunspots through a lens-based apparatus, Galileo’s drawings of sunspots reveal the progress of sun spots across the sun’s surface over time as separate ‘frames’, that suggest the sequential image in animation.
During the summer months of 1612, Galileo let the sun’s light through the eyepiece and projected an image onto a piece of paper, following the process one of his students had developed, rather than blind himself by looking directly through his telescope at the sun. He made drawing after drawing at the same time each day in a sequence that demonstrates change in sunspot activity over time. The foreshortening of the sunspots on the edges of the sphere and their movement from left to right was the first evidence that the sun was a spinning sphere (Green 2016, 77–78). In 1613 the drawings were published in Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno Alle Macchie Solari e Loro Accidenti Rome (History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and their Properties). Researcher Albert Van Helden has animated the images online on his webpage The Galileo Project (1993) in what he calls a ‘flip-book’ type sequence. In Enlightenment science the ‘triadic structure of words, knowers and things’ began to solidify into separate entities (Barad 2007, 138). Galileo takes on authority as the knower, the things (apparatus) and the sun spots (the phenomena) became represented as findings published (words), and he became intensely competitive with Scheiner. Yet philosopher of science Karen Barad reminds us that with every measurement using an instrument in which we ‘peek inside’ a phenomenon, our measuring mark entangles with the phenomenon being measured (345). When contemporary artist-animators engage with scientific phenomena the distinction between phenomena, knower or observer and the primacy of the written word begins to dissolve again. This sense of the inseparability of instrument, phenomena and observer resonates with the creation of the solar image in Belson’s experimental film-making practice.
Belson’s apparatus, beyond the heliocentric universe
By the 1960s, knowledge about the sun and the cosmos was advancing rapidly with the advent of observation satellites, and the static, heliocentric universe of enlightenment scientists was replaced by the knowledge of an ever-expanding, infinite cosmos. Belson used circular radial motifs as archetypal images of both interior (psychological) space and physical ‘outer’ space. Belson’s most active period of film-making and animation spanned the period of the space race, as well as nuclear testing in the Pacific, and his films reflect many developments in space technology and science. His well-known amorphous, gaseous circular images evolved from the Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in the late 1950s. The Vortex concerts were widely attended by enraptured audiences in San Francisco, with viewings occurring two or three times a night at their peak, over a three-year period. Belson developed techniques of merging abstract images to suggest solar phenomena, along with rhythms of kaleidoscopic geometric forms and oscilloscope streak dots and slowly fading lights, synced with music by electronic sound composer Henry Jacobs (Brougher 2005).
As a ten-year-old child I visited San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium in the Golden Gate park on a family trip from Auckland in the 1980s. I was awed by the cosmic projections in the hemispheric dome and the accompanying scientific experiments in the museum. No earlier experience for me compared to the marvel of a flash of light that left a rainbow-hued outline of my body against a white wall, recalling Newton’s experiments with a prism of glass to reveal that white light was made of rainbow colours. Strangely this experiment also recalls the shadow left after the flash of nuclear light in Hiroshima. I didn’t know at the time how this image-sensation was created, yet looking back, this moment embodied the legacy of the experimentation in the Vortex concerts at the planetarium that continue to the present. My own experience resonates with Barad’s performative account of scientific practices that unsettle the separation between the human body and phenomena, in this case of phenomena of light. Barad writes that a performative account of scientific practices, ‘takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’ (Barad 2007, 49). She comments that little exchange has happened between science studies and social and political theorists about the nature of the ‘real’ in quantum terms. Yet I argue that a dialogic relationship exists between experimental animation, digital art practice and the sciences that bring the body into the act of sensing how matter transforms.
In the light projection technology of the Vortex concerts, Belson discovered slow fades and zooms as an effective means of creating movement compared to his early frenetically paced animations. He states, ‘After working with some very sophisticated equipment at Vortex I learned the effectiveness of something as simple as fading in and out very slowly’ (Youngblood 1970, 162). Rather than conceiving animation as one frame at a time, he made cycles of images built from multiple exposures, dissolves and fades. With a full rotary-controlled set of projectors Belson tested ‘making the whole dome very dark red and then we introduced the full starfield into the dark red’ before fading out again (Macdonald 1998, 73–74). There is one sequence where the glowing red circle in the far distance slowly shifts closer that suggests the approach of a solar body. I speculate that Belson’s evocation of the red light connects to the cosmological ‘redshift’ in physics which evidences our ever-expanding universe. Sufficiently distant light sources show a redshift corresponding to the rate of increase in their distance from earth. Virilio writes that the theory of the expanding universe, suspected as early as 1922 by the Soviet Physicist Alexander Friedman, and proven by Edwin Hubble in 1929, informs our ‘cosmological optical illusion’ where there is no beginning or end to the cosmos beyond the earth. He continues, ‘The general flight of heavenly bodies, and the famous red shift in the light of galaxies, certainly leads to a perceptual vanishing point’ (Virilio 2000, 43). Belson’s slow fades into nothingness reflect this illusion-producing, ever-expanding universe.
Belson regards Allures (1961), a collaboration with Jacobs, as his ‘space-iest’ film after the Vortex concerts at the Morrison Planetarium which creates the feeling of a gravitational pull towards a deep void of the cosmos. He connects Allures to the mind-expanding moment of cosmogenesis with the most direct connection to the experience of the (unrecorded) Vortex concerts at the Morrison Planetarium (Youngblood, 160). Belson ascribed his inner eye with the ability to perceive cosmic truths that he only much later saw represented in scientific astrophotography. Light is a phenomena that becomes the subject of his films in itself; rather than as a tool for illuminating objects, light emanates from interior bodily experiences as well as from external cosmic light. For Belson inner space was discoverable through Mahayana Buddhism and yoga; and outer space through interstellar and galactic astrophysics (Youngblood, 159). In an interview with Larry Sturhahn, Belson stated, ‘The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me. The screen is just that – a screen. Who’s to say that what you see on it is only perceived with the eyes’ (Sturhahn 1975, 27). This sensing beyond sight, is also important to Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, as discussed in the later part of the chapter.
Allures is described by Belson as ‘a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena’ (Youngblood, 160). Less than two minutes into the film we slowly fade in to a pulsating red solar image. A low base tone in the soundtrack accompanies the changing colours of the central orb. The expansion and compression of matter feels endless, generating and generative, recalling Barad’s understanding of the material conditions that enfold phenomena, apparatuses and our bodies together (Barad 2007, 244). We feel the sound resonating through our bodies and the pulsing light radiates through our retina, agitating our internal rhythms. The ever-changing interference patterns in Allures evidence the agentive properties of mattering as a differentiating process; where ‘spacetime is an enactment of differentness, a way of making/marking here and now’ (Barad, 137). Belson enfolds external ‘space-time’ into the body and into flows of matter in a way that resonates with Barad’s philosophy. Her posthumanist undoing of the common representation of the body ‘as a natural and fixed dividing line between interiority and exteriority’ (Barad, 136) is materially present in Belson’s collapsed vision of inner, bodily space-time in co-relation with the vastness of galaxies in his films.
In Belson’s most productive period, Gene Youngblood’s wild, ‘paleocybernetic’ interpretative lens on his oeuvre also recognised a closeness between artists’ and scientists’ vision of the ‘transinfinite’. For Youngblood (1970), an expanded consciousness emerges through mescaline, meditation or both, to reach our primitive ‘paleo’ brain, along with the ‘practical utopianism’ of the cybernetic age of expansive networks of telecommunications. He proclaims, the ‘Paleocybernetic age witnesses the concretization of intuition and the secularization of religion through electronics’ (Youngblood, 41). In addition to a radical reassessment of inner space, the new age is characterised by the ‘wholesale obsolescence of man’s historical view of outer space’ (Youngblood, 137). P. Adams Sitney also notes Belson’s temporal commitment to the ‘all-consuming present’, as a ‘meditative quest through the radical interiorization of mandalic objects and cosmic imagery’ (Sitney 2002, 258–259). In a later interview with Scott MacDonald, Belson plays down the effects of hallucinogenic drugs and focuses on his inner journey to self-enlightenment through meditation and yoga. In the howling tones of Samadhi (1967), Belson’s inhaling and exhaling can be heard, in accompaniment to changes in colour and intensity of the solar spheres.
Belson’s film-making table, based on a converted X-ray stand, is an elusive figure in the three major discussions of his practice by Sitney, Youngblood and MacDonald. They each note the filmmaker’s reticence in revealing the technical aspects of his work. Belson saw the instrument as less important than the film’s meaning, countering the techno-determinist rationale for his film-making. Belson’s optical bench for animating in San Francisco’s North beach is described by Youngblood as ‘essentially a plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors and variable intensive lights’ (158). This set-up allowed Belson to create films out of intensities, ebbs and flows of light effects that he developed in the Vortex concerts. After his collaboration with Jacobs ended, Belson also synthesised his own sound on home equipment. The close relations between the film-making-table instrument to the phenomena being produced and the light phenomena represented fuses material concerns of abstract art and the similar questions pursued within the science of optics.
Belson comments that it was not until after Samadhi when he made Momentum that he started researching solar phenomena in earnest. During the 18 month period when Belson was making Momentum, the artist stated,
All the material [for Momentum] was similar if not identical to solar phenomena, photosphere phenomena, chromosphere phenomena, sun spots, plasma storms – I was even getting in to some interesting speculation of what goes on inside the sun. And I realised the film doesn’t stop at the centre of the sun, it goes to the centre of the sun and into the atom. The end shows the paradoxical realm in which subatomic phenomena and the cosmologically vast are identical.
(Youngblood, 176)
Momentum reveals the dark centre of the sun awash solar storms. Samadhi, made prior to Belson’s acknowledgement of the close relation of his films to scientific solar imaging, also features flaming wave effects and a darkness that suggests, to me at least, the imagery of nuclear detonation from above. Of the Vortex concerts, Belson commented that he aimed to achieve ‘Beautiful and terrifying sensations and feelings’ (MacDonald, 75). Both these affects suffuse these films.
There is little mention, however, of the impact of the terrifying visual spectacle of nuclear detonation in commentary on Belson’s oeuvre. Images of waves of radiation and glowing orbs of destructive force must have loomed large in the consciousness of liberal-minded occupants of San Francisco in the post-Hiroshima period and throughout the continuing experiments at Bikini Atoll. Media historian Douglas Kahn argues that the spectacle of the series of tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 became the most photographically and cinematically recorded event in history (Kahn 2013, 171). In images of the United States’ Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954, the sun appears as a blinding white light that turns the sky red. The size of this explosion far exceeded expectations and spread radioactive material throughout the globe. A bluish light as a secondary ring radiates out from other Bikini Atoll images, just as secondary rings surround a central orb in Belson’s Samadhi. While the flashes in Allures, produced by a near white-out of the frame, bring to mind the white nuclear flash against a red sky. The rumbling, threatening sounds in Samadhi evoke the dark undercurrent of the atomic age, as one of the paradoxes of the search for individual freedom in the era of ‘Hippie Modernism’ (Blauvelt et al. 2015).
Many of the artists who work at the intersection of art and technology from this period were motivated to generate an alternative vision as a reaction to the destructive effects of the bomb. The age of the space race, and a burgeoning ecological consciousness occurred in parallel with the threat to the planet of a nuclear event. Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes that in American post-war propaganda, ‘weapons of mass destruction were naturalised by likening them to harnessing the power of the sun, and their radioactive by-products were depicted as no less dangerous than our daily sunshine’ (2011, 236–237). DeLoughrey argues that the persistent use of solar metaphors for understanding nuclear weaponry have been vital to naturalising global militarisation. Belson would surely have been well aware of nuclear imagery and its frequent comparison to the sun’s force. Solar imagery accrues powerful affects by association with nuclear explosion, just as today, the sun is synonymous with the encroaching threat of global warming.
Joyce Hinterding and David Haines: Earthstar
In 2011, the year of Belson’s death, I came across the sound and video installation Earthstar at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne, and I was immediately transported back to Belson’s archetypal solar forms. Joyce Hinterding and David Haines describe the work as a visual and aural ‘portrait of the sun’. The animated hydrogen-alpha sequence of the sun in Haines’ Earthstar video projection is made from thousands of composite images animated at 25 frames per second to form a four-minute long sequence. The animation sequence commences with a bright white orb of the sun, almost too bright to look at, against a red background. The next phase is a black orb with a circular red frame which is the hydrogen stretching out – flaring frequently. The final sequence shows the yellow orb flecked with red solar activity. The colour phases depend on the length of exposure of each image, with the longest exposures at two minutes. Haines made creative decisions around the lengths of exposure and frame-rate of the animations to simulate the movement of sunflares.
Each image leaves an imprint on the retina; a perceptual effect that suggests the intensity of looking at the sun with the naked eye, similar to the effects produced by Belson’s Samadhi. These are raw frames with little post production, although they are false colour images, shot in monochrome. The dynamic range of the image is a composite of many exposures to get the final outcome. Rather than suppressing the role of the instrument in the observation of nature as classical physicists once did, the instrument that creates the sound to accompany this animation is laid out in the gallery space. To form the pulsating images of the sun for Earthstar, Haines experimented with a hydrogen-alpha telescopic lens for his camera. This newly available lens enabled solar activity to be observed by the layperson, through the detection of the major gas in the sun’s make-up: Hydrogen. Viewing the sun through the telescope produces a red solar disc by shifting the ultraviolet light to the red part of the visual spectrum.
The electromagnetic frequencies from the sun that drive Hinterding’s sound composition are produced by the same type of radiation as ultraviolet light revealed by the hydrogen alpha telescope, although with differences in wavelength and frequency. In the Earthstar installation, custom-made radio antennae wrapped with coils of copper wire capture the electromagnetic energies of the sun. Energy is converted to sound in the form of crackles and hisses and pops on these long instruments lying on benches in the gallery.
Hinterding and Haines’ recent work Sound Ship (descender 1) (2016), is described by the artists as the first artist-launched site-specific artwork in the stratosphere. The artists attached several GoPro cameras and various instruments to a weather balloon to capture the ascent to the sun as well as a reverse perspective back to earth. The sun’s lights flare around the edge of the images, as if animated by the solar body. In science, such effects are regarded as optical aberrations made by the instruments and they would be ‘cleaned up’ from the recorded account. Like Belson’s Re-entry (1964), Sound Ship (descender 1) is structured around literal ascent into space, the close images of the sun and a hurtling descent as the camera crashes back into the Earth made from a real-time imagery of space travel. Belson’s early films were composited through optical effects and video mixing, whereas in a later film The Astronaut’s Dream (1981), Belson drew on NASA material such as rockets taking off and mixed it with his own material. The reversed image of the sun from the countervailing perspective of a rocket ship, or from camera’s drifting on a weather balloon, in Hinterding and Haines case forges a connection to our closest star.
Sarah and Joseph Belknap: 12 Months of the Sun (2014)
While Haines uses his own images taken with a hydrogen-alpha telescope, the Chicago-based partnership Sarah and Joseph Belknap draw on scientific images for animating the sun that are freely available to consumers. The artists animate remote satellite technology by accessing free images from NASA’s mobile app Space Weather Media Viewer (2011). Telescopes at NASA’s satellite-based Solar Observatory take ten highly detailed images of the sun’s atmosphere every twelve seconds and give us images well beyond the scope of visible light. The data generated by the instruments from the observatory adds 1.5 terabytes of data to our picture of the solar atmosphere every day (Green 2016, 2). Through the Space Weather Media Viewer, the distant light of stars can be held in our hands, mediated by technology, where Aristotle once looked at the sun through his fingers.
In the Belknaps’ multichannel installation 12 Months of the Sun (2014), exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014–2015), a range of animations of the sun from the Space Weather Media Viewer app are animated. The visualisation decisions of the NASA team are highlighted in a multi-screen arrangement of monitors, where each contains a different, false-colour image of the sun; from the yellows of Atmospheric-Assembly images to the red, large angle Spectrometric Coronograph images. The Belknaps profess a curiosity about the filtered seeing of instruments that I also share. The artists delight in the scientists’ use of false colour, emphasising its purpose as follows: ‘it allows us to see things that the human eye cannot see. It is both real and faked/mediated. The enhancement and modification is not done to deceive but rather to show what we cannot see’ (Picard 2014). Scientific images of the sun and universe are made up of the sensors of instruments designed by engineers, mathematical formulae, and digital computation of abstract information yet there is also an element of imagination in colour choice. Kahn parodically describes scientists’ space visualisations as vibrantly colourful, ‘jewel-encrusted bling’ that paints the universe as if ‘the cosmic egg were from Fabergé’ (Kahn, 227). The artists use this ‘false’ colour aesthetic with an ironic nod to the riotous palette of many animated scientific visualisations.
The animation in 12 Months of the Sun is also deliberately clunky because the artists used an idiosyncratic method to decide on which images to animate. As a reflection of the couple’s inner states, whenever one of the artists thought about or mentioned the sun to each other they would download an image to become part of the sequence to animate (Lund 2014, 2). The result is that many frames are ‘missing’ in the sequences. Like Belson, there is an irreverent fusion of so-called objective, scientific methods and intuitive ‘artistic’ or psychological methods of making. The scientist’s observation of the sun is regulated while the artists produce an animation with humorously irregular time-lapses. Rather than a seamless, high-tech screen system, the animations are also presented on a teetering stack of televisions, in a homely distillation of advanced scientific imaging.
Belson, intermedia, the cosmos and I
Like Belson, Hinterding and Haines, and the Belknaps, I am drawn to the space instruments that generate visions of the cosmological horizon. In the late 1990s I studied Intermedia at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, under the energetic and visionary sound artist and filmmaker Phil Dadson. I didn’t realise until later that our ‘Intermedia’ department was named after Youngblood’s radical inflection of the term intermedia in Expanded Cinema. Youngblood used intermedia to signal how the ‘entire environment’ is suffused with elements that draw from art as well as science, rather than simply to describe the inter-mixing of technical forms or disciplines (Youngblood, 347). The artist as ecologist was very much part of both Youngblood’s and later Phil Dadson’s interdisciplinary vision. Our student performance events included trips to the summit of Maungawhau, the local volcanic cone, with custom-made sound-making instruments to celebrate Winter Solstice, linking the earthly and the planetary.
Like Belson, Dadson’s visual and sound-based artistic language, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, was inspired by a rich cultural milieu that included readings of the I Ching, meditation and environmental activism, including a political resistance to nuclear testing in Mururoa Atoll in our Pacific neighbourhood. Youngblood defined ecology in cybernetic terms, like Gregory Bateson, as ‘the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment’ (Youngblood, 346). His insight that the artist’s role is the revelation of ‘previously unrecognised relationships between existing phenomena’ still resonates with my own art practice. As a student I was also consuming experimental abstract film, including available works by Belson from the comprehensive video library managed by animator Greg Bennett (interviewed in this book) and Roger Horrocks, one of the key authors on experimental filmmaker Len Lye at the University of Auckland in the 1990s.
Circular forms and an engagement with environmental science and astronomy emerged in my artworks from an early stage. I not only made experimental films from 16 mm film stock, VHS video tape and ‘vision mixers’, and later digital cameras and software such as After Effects, but I also made circular screens from resin discs onto which to project my orb-shaped abstractions. In 2005 I developed a 1.5 metre, curved, round Perspex screen that was suspended horizontally above a crowded group lying below in Report to Darmstadt (Auckland, 2005). This work was my first animation using satellite imagery in an outdoor sculpture event at night at Corban Art Estate. I negotiated with Landcare-Research NZ to use weather satellite images above the Southern hemisphere that would otherwise be discarded as excess data, once the particular weather data became obsolete as commercial information. The curved screens, I envisioned, were enlarged instruments in which one could drift inside an imagined cosmos. The soundtrack in Report to Darmstadt included publicly available sound recordings from the atmosphere of Mars that was transmitted back to the European Space operations centre in Darmstadt in Germany. Although I was unaware of it at the time of making my work, Belson’s film Re-Entry (1964) also included dialogue of astronomer John Glenn’s first flight into orbit. Belson comments, ‘If you listen very carefully to the soundtrack, you actually hear John Glenn’s voice mumbling something about passing over Perth, Australia’ (MacDonald, 76). Re-Entry is also a film structured around an imaginary departure from Earth, a speculative glimpse into an aspect of the cosmos not visible from Earth and then a re-entry into its atmosphere (see Figure 10.1).
FIGURE 10.1 Janine Randerson, Remote Senses, Storms Nearby (Shanghai Festival of Art and Science, Shanghai, 2007). Multi-channel installation (perspex, custom-formed screens), with animated satellite images of weather patterns over China and Aotearoa New Zealand.
By 2006 I began using multiple hemispheric-shaped acrylic screens for animating MTSat-1R satellite imagery which I downloaded frame by frame with permission from the Japanese Meteorological Association and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne. Although the negotiation to legally use satellite data for an artist’s animation was complex, the animating of computer-generated imagery is much faster in digital form than in Belson’s time. However, like Belson, to supplement the graphic satellite images I used layers of real-time video images, including flames of fire, shifting shafts of light reflected on walls or light bouncing off oscillating pot lids to provide a greater depth to what I perceived as the flatness of the graphics of Adobe After Effects. Belson used seven or eight layers of imagery including lasers, optical printing, liquid crystals, a mixer from a television broadcasting studio, as well as some found footage. For the dual projection installation Aerosphere and Atmosphere (2011), Hungarian artist Nina Czegledy and I collaborated on projections on the exterior of a remote wooden observatory dome in Taranaki on the West coast of New Zealand. We projected and animated scientific images of the north pole of Mars and the Antarctic pole of earth.
Albedo of Clouds
My engagement with the animation of satellite imagery deepened with Albedo of Clouds (2012). This work concerns the sun’s light, although my animations are made from the opposite perspective to Belson. The two-screen installation, also using the custom-made round screens described above, was conceived as a conversation between an artist and a meteorological satellite. A late nineteenth century experiment by Australian astronomer P. Baracchi for two cloud observers and their instruments underpins the compositional logic of the installation. In this period of astronomy and a nascent meteorology, observing practices of the heavens drew on both aesthetics and natural history to measure distance with early photographic and telegraphic technology. Baracchi’s report ‘Cloud Observation in Victoria’ published in the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science Report (1898, 259–273) was written in response to the late call in 1897 for Melbourne Observatory to participate in an international cloud observation project to generate material for a cloud atlas.
The experiment required two astronomers communicating by telegraph to photograph the same cloud at the same time from different points in Melbourne. Later the two plate photographs were superimposed by ‘shadowgraphing’ them onto one plate. Using an alignment of the two zenithal points of the cameras it was possible for them to determine the height and velocity of the cloud under scrutiny. Baracchi discusses in detail the ‘beautifully paired’ Zeiss anastigmat lenses and a small dish containing mercury which was placed between the camera and the telescope. The observers were sometimes forced to use yellow screens over the lenses ‘principally intended to deal with the higher clouds, some classes of which are sometimes barely visible against the deep blue sky’ (Baracchi 1898, 263–64). Baracchi’s report provides illustrations of pairs of photographs produced on Ilford chromatic plates developed slowly by Metol-hydroquinone with enlargements of the negatives on bromide paper.
To collect cloud images for my installation, I set up a camera in the same ground-based observing position as Baracchi in Melbourne. My view from below the clouds is matched with a satellite-based image of the same clouds from above, in collaboration with a Mike Wilmott, a satellite meteorologist at Melbourne’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). Although Albedo of Clouds is a quasi-scientific account of a historical experiment, the project speculates on why clouds reflect and how different technologies ‘see’ clouds through human and non-human modes of observation. BoM derives its weather data from MTSat-1R, a Japanese weather satellite in geosynchronous orbit with the earth’s equator. The binary code that makes up the distributed weather images of cloud passes through space via the scans of the MTSat-1R satellite through trans-governmental agreements to be disseminated through popular weather news media in Australia (Randerson et al. 2015, 16–24). The spatial mobility of the satellite has been situated as an agent for circulating remote community engagement and creative activity, such as the trans-global performance art pioneered by Nam June Paik. Despite the substantial history of creative access to satellite media, to access state-controlled meteorological satellite information as raw data was still a sensitive negotiation (Figure 10.2).
FIGURE 10.2 Janine Randerson, Albedo of Clouds (Hermitage Education Centre, St Petersburg, 2018). Two channel installation (with perspex, custom-formed screens), with animated satellite images of synoptic weather patterns.
A four-month period of interviews and archival research at BoM helped to shape my concept for Albedo of Clouds. Wilmott provided interpretations of the satellite data and cyclonic movement so I could understand how to animate the thousands of images generated daily. As an employee at the Australian bureau for 40 years Wilmott had a historical overview of satellite meteorology since its inception. He had been present through the development from analogue to digital satellite forecasting when the first weather images were delivered from television cameras attached to satellites in 1966. Wilmott demonstrated basic techniques of animating satellite data for weather broadcast, using cuts between images rather than dissolves. We discussed colourisation processes of the meteorological maps and how the choices of colour are determined. The data is processed using a data-ingester and some images are created in ‘false colour’ using software such as Maquaris or Paintshop Pro. I discovered the extent that the colour choices for satellite images are subjectively determined, or based around common identifications such as the representation of the land mass of Australia as red. The digital images are transferred onto digital linear tape and often the outline of the map of Australia is overlaid onto these images. Over several days, Wilmott extracted the data that allowed me to generate the remote observational perspective of the same clouds that we recorded with surface-based observations. He gave me a data file containing many thousands of images.
In Belson’s film Light (1973), the subject is the electromagnetic spectrum with infrared light on one end, ultraviolet light at the other and visible light in the middle (MacDonald, 77). Piano music in the soundtrack gives way to the subsonic roar of our cosmic beginnings. The progression of the animation sequence is structured on a scientific basis, shifting from solid forms and fields of colour to particles of light that ebb and flow and ultimately become fiercely intense, almost burning up the frame. I was also concerned with the role of both the heat and light of the sun in forming images in Albedo of Clouds. Three different instrumental means of sensing clouds via satellite were animated in my studio in from the data sets Wilmott gave me; first, visible images where the visible sunlight scattered or reflected towards the satellite from the Earth and clouds are recorded. In the animated visible images sequences there is an observable shift from night to day. Clouds play a crucial role in reflecting a certain amount of the Sun’s short wavelength (visible light) radiation back into space. The proportion of radiation reflected by a substance is called its albedo. The lower and denser the cloud, such as stratocumulus cloud, the higher the level of albedo. The possibility of producing artificial clouds drives many geo-engineering schemes to counter the effects of global warming through this albedo effect. The second sequence in the installation is animated from infrared images that are produced from the temperature of the underlying surface or cloud that radiates thermal-infrared wavelengths where cloud albedo is contrasted in black and white. The darkest areas of the infrared image are the hottest; the Australian continent can be discerned beneath the clouds as it heats and cools. The third sequence consists of water vapour images that are produced by radiation emitted by water vapour when it is taken as the dominant absorbing gas. The albedo of clouds stands out against its shadowed negative, the darkness.
The editing process for Albedo of Clouds drew together the surface-based live recordings of the clouds and the space-based recording of the satellite. I slowly animated the visible, infrared and water vapour satellite images given to me by Wilmott over several weeks. To achieve the speed of dissolves for the animated satellite images, I went through a series of tests in After Effects, using the techniques I had developed in Areosphere and Atmosphere and Report to Darmstadt. As each image was an hour apart in real time, I simulated a pace of animated dissolve between stills for the viewer to approximate the movement of the live video-recorded clouds. I intuitively selected a speed of 12 still frames per second; 1200 stills comprise nearly two minutes of animation. While the meteorological data began as documentary information, a lengthy post-production instilled a particular pace to the piece as an artwork. Like Belson, I was interested in how slow fades in and out could also become a form of animation.
For the spatial composition of the installed projection screens, the stereoscopic nature of Baracchi’s experiment suggested that I use a pair of hanging screens to show these differing perspectives. Baracchi’s (1898) description of the circular ‘beautifully paired’ lenses, the small dish containing mercury and the roundness of the satellite images of the globe led me to return to a circular shape. Through tracking in and out of animated satellite images, I hoped to approximate an expansive sense of looking up at the cosmological optical illusion underneath the curved screen. I formed my constructed round screens as a counterpoint to the rectangular film frame, which I connect in retrospect to Belson’s abstract films. His preference for the circular over the rectangular may have emerged from his light experiments on the interior curve of the planetarium roof in the Vortex concerts.
By chance, the satellite images from BoM recorded an extreme weather event that had occurred in the same week of filming from the ground. On 7 May 2008, during the week selected for Wilmott to extract the satellite data, severe cyclonic storm Cyclone Nargis hit Burma. The cyclone made landfall at Ayeyarwady Province. The category four cyclone caused environmental destruction and over 138,000 people perished. The movement of the cyclone can be traced in the MTSat-1R images with a clearly defined eye by 1 May 2008. The cataclysmic event of Cyclone Nargis and the Burmese government’s obstruction of the international relief effort became a tragic part of the embedded animation in the Albedo of Clouds installation. As an inadvertent record of Cyclone Nargis, the animated satellite imagery of the Albedo of Clouds project became more explicitly connected to the current climate crisis and our increasingly severe storms. The reflected light of the sun opens onto speculation about the future of the earth’s atmosphere and the potential of clouds to protect us from the ferocity of the sun’s light. There is also a potent political context in the threat of nuclear annihilation in Belson’s work, just as the implicit issue of the climate crisis hovers over Hinterding and Haines and the Belknaps’ solar artworks.
For Youngblood the new instrumental capacities of lunar observatories and satellite telescopes radically affected a leap in human knowledge and an expansion of consciousness within the intermedia environment that had ‘become as nature’ (Youngblood 1970, 137). Belson was undoubtedly aware of scientific forms of representation of the cosmos, yet conversely the pulsing waves and showers of particles produced in Belson’s films and the Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium have also had a pervasive effect on aesthetics of the ‘cosmos’ in animated scientific visualisation. Allures was widely seen in the 1960s, and Belson was invited to represent the cosmos in scientific documentaries such as the PBS documentary The Creation of the Universe (1985). While it is outside the scope of this chapter to try and make a concrete narrative of influence, I speculate that the concerts and Belson’s filmmaking informed the intense colourisation of scientific visualisations of solar and astro-phenomena. Contemporary astronomical animations are as much aesthetic images as those made by experimental filmmakers or artists when they represent data sets of phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye.
The making of optical illusions of the cosmos in experimental animation parallels the augmentation of our senses with astronomical instruments. From optical animation tables that emulate cosmic matter, adaptive reuse of telescopes, to custom-made round screens, artists imagine the cosmological horizon, with scientific knowledge as a departure point. Virilio suggests that there is no part of the heavens that does not show some angular deformation that is, in part, produced by viewing apparatus such as telescopes and satellite sensors; he writes, ‘the sky of astronomers and astrophysicists is never more than a gigantic refraction effect, a cosmic illusion due to the relativity of celestial motion’, that is shaped by our viewing apparatus of the telescope’ (Virilio, 47). Artists have also contributed to our imaginings of the cosmos by producing new ways to experience light as a spatio-temporal phenomena. In Belson’s work in particular we encounter ever-expanding light as an experience of space-time, rather than through solid planetary bodies, or any heliocentric version of the cosmos. Although the 16 mm medium prohibited ongoing loops of Belson’s films, his works build and loop images internally, and his sound and image repertoire become raw materials that are shared from film to film. The contemporary art-animations discussed in this chapter operate in ongoing looped sequences in installations where there is no beginning or end, just an elastic sense of being constantly present inside an expanding universe. In the sensory intuitions of cosmological time produced in these artworks, our bodies become sensitive to cosmic energies and momentums, from wave-particles to the molecules of our own DNA.
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