Michael Cantor

here are a drawing experiments. I took iphone pictures of a few of my drawings and collaged them digitally, also with my iphone

materiaobscura:

Gemini and Photographic Abstractions from Low Earth Orbit (1 of 2)

all images © NASA/JSC/Arizona State University
full gallery of images can be found here

I recently stumbled upon a collection of images from the Mercury and Gemini programs that the Arizona State University’s March to the Moon program have posted online. They’ve gone through slide archives from the Johnson Space Center with painstaking thoroughness: cataloging, scanning, and post-processing (restoring images to their original clarity and coloration) every image, before making the whole collection publicly available.  All shots taken by astronauts with a Hasselblad 500c medium format camera, from on board the Gemini capsule in low earth orbit.

These shots immediately touched a chord with me. In these collections, I see the source material for the aesthetics of the major touchstone of modern science fiction cinema: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a film that had a profound impact on me as a child. It’s a film I’ve revisited several times over the course of my life, each time finding new entry points to engage with it, and new lenses through which to understand it.

While I’ve always been a fan of science fiction films and literature, I’ve always felt a disconnect with the “Golden Age” of science fiction. Isaac Asimov was too cold and sterile. Robert Heinlein too militaristic and chauvinistic. 1950s Sci-fi films and television (Lost in Space, The Forbidden Planet, Buck Rogers) too campy. For my tastes, science fiction doesn’t get interesting until the “New Wave” of the 60s and the 70s.

This is when Sci-fi began to engage with big ideas. Ursula K. Le Guin. J.G. Ballard. Samuel Delaney. Philip K. Dick. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. This is when Sci-fi began to examine the human condition, to question the very nature of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a society.

What else was happening in the 60s? Well, besides the awaking of consciousness throughout society, there was the first manned excursions into space. The very idea of venturing beyond the cusp of earth’s atmosphere excited the imagination of people all over the world. “Earthrise”, the photo of Earth rising over the surface of the moon, from the Apollo 8 mission, has become one of the most viewed images and most influential images in human history. Physicist and Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently gave a powerful lecture on the idea of Space as Culture. He argued that “Earthrise”  was the origin point for the environmental movement, as it forced everyone to view the world as a totality: borderless, continuous, yet finite and contained within the vast void of space. This is it. We have one earth. and when we use it up there is no going back.

These images from the Gemini mission are the rarely seen precursors to “Earthrise.” Their silent power, their stark beauty renders obsolete all the fanciful, campy imaginings of the Golden Age of Sci-fi. Compared to the reality of manned space flight, Lost in Space looks like a frivolous cartoon.

There is a cold terror, an icy neutrality to these images, in which the Earth is viewed against the vast void of the Cosmos. That existential dread, the realization that Earth and all of human history is insignificant on the cosmic scale, is the fuel from which the New Wave of sci-fi draws it’s power. Kubrick understood this, as did Tarkovsky. Ridley Scott made that dread palpable in Alien.

And yet there is a mystery to these images, a sense of wonder and childlike discovery, as Carl Sagan explored masterfully in his Cosmos series. To me, these photos capture a point of origin from which the aesthetics and intellectual explorations of modern science fiction emerged.