INTRODUCTION: The Aesthetics of Wonder

Introduction (Jelena Rakin)

Images from Earth Observation and astronomy captivate with an overwhelming aesthetics. They often evoke a sense of beauty in viewers, even though the foundations for such an effect are not always immediately obvious in the context of scientific images. However, upon closer look, the constitutive elements of these pictures can be interpreted in terms of several fundamental categories used in art and media history to describe and understand images—such as harmony, line, color, or materiality. This exhibition sheds light on the historical, cultural, and aesthetic mechanisms that allow for a comparison of these scientific images with abstract works of art.

Perspective and painterly quality of the image

The abstraction of the image is achieved by the disappearance of the usual features of physical reality. A photographic image, therefore, differs in several respects from the physical reality it represents. This includes differences in scale, the absence of the impression of gravity—allowing the arbitrary positioning of up and down in the image—the loss of spatial depth through the translation of three-dimensionality into the two-dimensional image surface, the absence of olfactory qualities, and more. The fact that images from Earth Observation and astronomy repeatedly elicit admiration for their "painterly" quality is certainly also due to the fact that, through specific perspective, they acquire a distinctly abstract quality. When a forest, desert, or ocean is photographed from a bird's eye view instead of with a camera held at the eye level of a person on the ground, familiar orientation features such as the horizon, ground, or sky are no longer recognizable. When one moves even farther away from the Earth, the scale changes significantly. The sensory experience usually made by the human body loses its reference points in this macro perspective. One is no longer dealing with an anthropocentric view, which has shaped the history of images. Instead, the familiar becomes strange, and physical reality turns into an abstract image.

Owing to photography, modern painting freed itself from the imitation of physical reality. The 20th century marks the turn of painting toward the exploration of the image surface and color as autonomous qualities. The image surface is no longer a window into (simulated) three-dimensional space, and color in painting is no longer a means to an end. Thanks to the numerous contemporary images from Earth Observation and astronomy, we suddenly have access to an inexhaustible source of comparably abstract "paintings" whose wondrous colors continue to fascinate the general public. When combined with an abstract perspective, the colors in Earth Observation and astronomical images appear to represent themselves, not imitating anything. In some of these images, the use of false colors further enhances the effect of autonomous color.

Abstraction and representation in photography

From the very beginning, photography had a novel relationship with physical reality. In contrast to traditional images created by human hand such as drawings or paintings, photography was attributed with objectivity and a documentary character. Since photography is created with the help of a mechanical device, it was believed to merely document the world without human intervention. For this reason, in the 19th century, French astronomer François Arago introduced it into astronomy as the promise of a "universal mathematical language." However, this supposed objectivity of the photographic device enables a multitude of specific representational decisions—such as the length of exposure (long exposure or much shorter intervals of a snapshot), framing, or decisions about color. A specific practical decision with aesthetic consequences in Earth Observation and astronomy is to produce images without clouds. In a certain way, this connects to the long-standing classical ideal of the “most representative moment” in art, that attempts to capture the "ideal" view. But other decisions also continue to demonstrate interventions in the supposedly objective documentary image—false color being perhaps the most striking phenomenon here. What in classical photography is achieved by multiple exposure could be compared in the images of astronomy and Earth Observation to the overlaying of different visualizations of datasets within the image. Even though classical photography was never a purely documentary process, contemporary images from astronomy and Earth Observation revise this tension between documentation and creative visualization in entirely new and imaginative ways.

PART I - Earth Observation from an Art Historical Perspective

PART II - Art Historical Contextualization of Images in Astrophysics