07 Jul 2015

Today's guest blog is by Luci Eldridge from the Royal College of Art. She'll be talking at our 'Ways of Seeing' conference, looking at perceptions of the planet Mars gained through stereo-imaging.  Drawing connections between art historical examples and contemporary representational practices in science, my paper for Ways of Seeing will investigate how scientists and engineers explore and perceive the planet Mars through stereo-imaging. Scientists encounter this otherworldly terrain through active engagement with the image, through prolonged and intensified looking. Drawing on visits to the Regional Planetary Imaging Facility at UCL and the V&A’s photographic archive, this paper will explore this act of prolonged looking from an arts and humanities perspective. It will foreground the materiality of the stereo-image with particular reference to glitch theory and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Image analysis will be analytical, speculative, and subjective, reflecting on what it might be like to step into the image of Mars rather than onto the terrain, an example of which may be seen below. Mount Sharp is a smudged horizon, a veil of dust with sharp interruptions of red and blue. Jagged borders. There are three horizon lines to this image; that of where land meets sky and that of where sky meets the void of an image-less place. The third is more subtle, it is the space in between the land and the sky, the faint tinge hovering above the dusty horizon, pixelated and shimmering in red and blue. Curiosity’s goal has been saved from the void of disillusion. Upturned waves mark the top of this murky clearing, the sky juts upwards to reveal Mount Sharp swimming in the pale grey. But the sky is cracked in too many places and glitches in image data become faint streaks of colour in the grey atmosphere. Dust seems to build up in these crevices and the seams become heavy, threatening to split apart and reveal the black vacuum beyond. This nothingness draws us in and pushes us back, representing the intangible and becoming a space for imagination. The landscape wraps around us in a 360 panorama, the shroud of invisibility envelops all senses. Stepping through the dark archway onto the grey Martian dirt, the scene glides towards us in an apparition as its translucency merges us with the glimmering landscape. There seems to be a path laid out ahead between the shattered flat rocks and splicing primary colours but distances along this path are unidentifiable, objects are of no fixed size. Boulders float through image space towards us. Reaching out to touch part of the landscape my hand sinks below the surface; the luminous terrain in the digital space is transitory, immaterial. Turning around I see the warped body of Curiosity, merged with the silver screen, distorted through its own flattening of a three dimensional rendition on a two dimensional plane. A simulated illusion of space, the greyscale landscape has been made three-dimensional through the imposition of red and blue, these anaglyph colours interlaced into the landscape’s skin like veins. The sun glows from behind panels of dust. The blue is blinding. The sky pearlescent. The flickering translucency of the screen above and beneath the landscape. For more cutting-edge approaches to ‘Ways of Seeing’ join us for the Queen’s House conference 2015 on 17 July. Image caption: Mars Stereo View from "John Klein" to Mount Sharp. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech