The famous couple

“It was very hard finding this photograph. We needed to navigate the thin channel between full bodily disclosure and NASA’s fear of the adverse publicity generated by sending pictures of naked people into space. Apparently we failed, because this was the only picture in our final image sequence that NASA would not allow on the Record.

I had the idea of drawing silhouettes to accompany selected Voyager photographs in an attempt to help the ETs understand how we see pictures, and the importance of edge-detection in our vision. By maximizing the figure/ground relationship of the important subjects, I hoped the photographs would be easier to understand.

This photograph of a nude human couple was taken by George Hester, a widely respected photographer of nudes. His photograph did not fly but the silhouette did. How mysterious it may seem to ET looking for the photograph that should accompany this silhouette. How will they explain the absence? Is the concept of body taboo even possible for ET to infer?

NASA was less concerned about offending ET’s sensibilities than the reaction of the contemporary audience. They decided that the American public was not ready for full frontal nudity on spacecraft. They worried the public would react negatively and the result would be an unfavorable reaction that would damage NASA.

In almost thirty years of telling this story to audiences of every demographic makeup, I have yet to find a single person who admits to agreeing with NASA’s decision. In fact it has been considered the worst error made in the creation of the Voyager Record.”

– An account by Jon Lomberg

Pioneer plaques

Designed by Carl Sagan & Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan.

“The Pioneer plaques (9x6 inches) are a pair of anodized aluminum plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

...The Pioneer spacecraft were the first human-built objects to leave the Solar System.”

The plaque contains within its pictorial symbolism a complex message which assumes a language or method of reading that on the one hand details a scientific methodology for deducing the spacecraft’s origin, and on the other attempts to convey something elementary about the life-form that is the cause of its existence. It is at once minutely specific and also metaphorical; on the left hand side, it details a radial pattern which stand for “periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit” and on the right, the naked white Occidental man raises his hand in good will. We have paired ourselves down to our most simplified and elementary components as a way of revealing something essential about humankind, but what are we really conveying about ourselves?

See also: Edward Tufte's redesign of the plaque, the voyager golden record and the Arecibo message.

– Rosie

Using light to talk about light

Bill Culbert - An Explanation of Light (1984)

Ask yourself: what does this piece explain (if anything) about the physical nature of light? Furthermore, what can art do to the function and meaning of an object?

Art behaves and explores topics very differently than science. Artists can be as ambiguous as they like (if they like), they invite open interpretation in an individual’s theoretical framework, as well as without a framework. Art is free to be totally ambiguous and misleading, it can mean whatever the viewer thinks or wants it to mean as well as what the artist intended it to mean at the same time. Is falsifiability impossible in establishing meaning in art? Is there a spectrum of this impossibility (if any at all) if we include illustration and information design? 

As for science, although experiments, theoretical reasoning and discourse can yield very ambiguous and strange results, the way scientists invite interpretation is concerned with inviting contestation and matching an interpretation against a distinct, descriptive, theoretical framework based on mathematics, logic, empiricism and falsibiablility. 

Where and how can art and science overlap? How (if at all) do they both attempt to repudiate the notion of universal facts and truths? Both art and science are concerned with critical enquiry i.e. re-think this light bulb as a functional object , re-think its properties or re-think the physical nature of light. How do both art and science contest epistemological justification, representationalism, and the notion of epistemic objectivity?

– Jennifer

Science fiction: Asking questions to the future

Latest since the industrial revolution, the cultural significance of science has become impossible to miss. It has transformed our lives beyond recognition and is continuing to do so at an ever increasing speed. The technologies we create change the way we interact with the world. Through the internet we have created means of communication that are dissolving our traditional notions of time and information. Before we have even come close to understanding its significance for the coming generation, this piece of technology itself has already transformed again and is now delocalised and touchable on a smart phone. How will this development change our view of the world? Will we be able to keep up with our own progress? Through science and technology, we have not only achieved a greater understanding of the world around us, we have also become able to shape it. But what happens when we do it?

Science fiction often attempts to trace out the answers without us even asking. Which way will tomorrow’s technology pave for us? What role will it play in the future of our society? As complex and speculative as these questions are, we cannot hide from them. In many science fiction stories this becomes most strikingly obvious when artificial intelligence enters the stage. We may be able to avoid asking ourselves the question what we want to do with our technology. But should we ever build an intelligent machine, it will do it for us. From ‘Odyssey 2001’ to ‘Blade Runner’ and Isaac Asimov’s short stories, once the future itself asks us how we got there, we better come up with a good answer.

– Malte

Invisible Structures

Paul Octavious JFK ✈ SFO

Paul Octavious JFK ✈ SFO

"Visualization is not simply a mediation between an independent world and a human perceiver. An image does not stand between the thing itself and a knowing subject. The selection of specimen, sites, the re-ordering of fields into grids, the operations of tagging, encoding, and marking, these activities reach into the world, arrange it in a pose, and cultivate its accountability. These artifices do not necessarily negate the world's natural accountability, although in some cases they are blamed for distortions and illusions. Instead, they are the very means through which natural order is revealed, ordered, compared, encoded, and quantified. Consequently, in answer to the question of what studies of visualization are about, we can say that they are about the production of scientific reality."

Michael Lynch, "Visual Cultures of Science" (2006)

– Malte