‘‘I try to console myself, knowing the closest I will ever get to these wonders is through my screen’’, 2018-19, Inkjet prints, variable dimensions *
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October 2017: with the success of NASA’s New Horizons Mission and its capacity to photograph Pluto when flying by as close as 12, 500 km, it is now made possible for the public to see what the dwarf planet looks like with common software such as GoogleMaps. Pluto, seen as ''the last frontier'' of our solar system, now has its official cartography, validated by the International Astronomical Union.
Within this, ‘‘I try to console myself, knowing that the closest I will ever get to these wonders is through my screen’’ functions as an attempt to address this relationship we maintain to celestial objects as they are made familiar by the extensive body of knowledge we have produced about it – digital photographic dissemination being one amongst many.
The process of slight editing actions, printing of scientific images or means of visualisation, photographing and reprinting aims to address our mediated relationship with Pluto and its condition of existence in our eyes.
By decontextualizing scientific images which exist in the first place for their data values – and not their aesthetic values – this work functions as an attempt to question this tension of knowledge through pictorial representation and the aesthetics of photographic representation: scientific images are assumed to provide us answers about the universe, but as an uninformed eye, what do we know by looking at these images? What kind of relationships are created through photographic discovery missions
This project seeks to focus on the perception of information and the ways it is concealed and experienced visually. By the use of the tension between visual through the photographic and reason through the informative aspect, I try to make claim about what we know of the cosmos and how we gain knowledge of it and what loss do we experience in the photographic encounter.
*The title of this project is borrowed from a quote in Elizabeth Kessler’s book Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Sublime.
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