PART II - Art Historical Contextualization of Images in Astrophysics

Author: Dr. Jelena Rakin

Nature Harmony and Spiral

In the comparative representation of galaxies simulated by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes in “Exploring the Universe through Different Eyes”, bright spirals depicting galaxies are visible against a dark background. The light-dark contrast brings dynamics to the image on the color level. The black background, which is iconographically significant for astronomical representations, stands out strongly. On the level of their contours, the spirals create an impression of harmony. They provide a recognizable form, similar to how the contour functions in a drawing. The spiral occupies a special place in nature and art history: in both contexts, it is closely linked to the fundamental principles of harmony concepts. In this regard, perhaps the most famous spiral is the Nautilus spiral, often cited as an example of the Fibonacci sequence and the mathematical basis of geometric harmony in nature. The spiral, inherent in various natural phenomena, has captivated the interest of photography early on. In the 1920s, the famous photograph by Karl Blossfeldt, showing the spiral-shaped leaves of a fern (1928), appeared in the book “Art Forms in Nature.” The medium of photography, which was meant to enable a new way of seeing, thus made the abstract beauty of natural forms more visible and simultaneously referred to the recurrence of certain geometric patterns as well as the permeability between scientific and aesthetic views of natural phenomena.

Significance and Metamorphosis of Color

The image “Euclid Flagship Simulation” shows a filamentary structure of dark matter, at the intersections of which galaxy clusters are located. This image is highly abstract in terms of what it represents (mock universe) as well as in its representation mechanisms (simulation). Of particular interest is the choice of color: dark matter is depicted as white—a decision that may seem counterintuitive. It becomes clear how strongly color choice can influence the interpretative content. When an abstractly appearing line structure—here, the filamentary network—is combined with abstract color, the image invites a multitude of further interpretations. It is an image with a high potential for ambiguity and richness of meaning. At first glance, various interpretations of such images are conceivable: like the obvious association of an aerial view of a water surface in “Euclid Flagship Simulation”. Here, the peculiar quality of color, which eludes clear categorization, plays a significant role. Ultimately, both artists and physicists have pondered for centuries over color: Is color part of the phenomena of the physical world or is it the result of subjective observation? Is there a definitive psychological interpretation of color? Due to its ability to metamorphose, color has been referred to in certain contexts as a “polymorphic magical substance” (Taussig). This transformative capacity of color seemed to offer at least one certainty among many uncertainties. In contemporary science, color has the status of an epiphenomenon—in contrast to properties such as weight or mass of a body, it is considered a “secondary” property—an accompanying phenomenon. In contemporary astronomy, however, one notices how precisely this affinity of color for metamorphosis and transformation is readily utilized in image aesthetics. “False color” refers in astronomy to the chromatic choices used to create images in the process of data translation.

The powerful effect of color to suggest the cosmic is also illustrated by the artistic short film “Novae” (2017, Thomas Vanz, France). In the film, the explosion of a supernova is staged using colored ink dispersed in water. What is particularly fascinating in this film is the aesthetic proximity—perhaps even aesthetic undecidability—of this coloration to those from popular astronomy.

The Aesthetics of Wonder

The representation of the cosmos is often associated with an aesthetics of wonder or the sublime. Particularly, the sublime has been heavily discussed in the context of landscape painting throughout art history. The image “Euclid's view of the Horsehead Nebula” also connects to the conventions of landscape painting in some respects, as it resembles a central perspective spatial representation. It seemingly invites its viewers to distinguish top from bottom, near from far in the image. Furthermore, there is the impression that these spatial values are not interchangeable, as is the case in many other cosmic images in this exhibition. Here, the materiality of the nebula, as well as the lighting and color design, play a significant role. While the nebula appears in an earthy brown, the other half of the image is rendered in shades of blue—similar to how, in landscape painting, the depiction of distance is often marked through a blue layer over the vast space. Often, the soft appearance of the clouds creates a mystical atmosphere when the sharp boundary between earth and sky is blurred in this way. The proximity of astronomical images to landscape painting has been particularly noted by media scholar Elizabeth Kessler, who observed the characteristic mechanisms for generating a sublime mood in the images of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such mechanisms she identified the impressions of awe, grandeur, mystery, the unknown, and also the impression of depth in images showing gorges, rocks, or peaks in the landscape. Cloudy vistas also contribute to this mood. The connection between cosmos and wondrous landscape appears in other contexts as well, as demonstrated by the documentary film “Hubble 3D” (2010, Toni Myers, USA), which invites viewers on a “real star journey” and presents the Orion Nebula, part of which includes the “Horsehead Nebula,” staged as a canyon.

Universalism of Cosmic Aesthetics

A black surface with stars as celestial bodies appears almost like an “archetype,” an iconographic representation of the universe. This minimalist depiction of a dark surface interspersed with bright points can be observed in various popular representations from film to the visual arts. From Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey” (UK/USA) to the monumental photographs of Thomas Ruff, there is a representational continuity in this sense. Even in the early technical photographs of space during the beginnings of astrophotography in the 19th century, there were aesthetic interventions where the background was made uniformly black to highlight the depicted bright celestial bodies. The result of such modifications were images that appeared flat, in which the space—despite actually representing immense spatial extents—seemed rather two-dimensional. Without depth markings, i.e., markings for the foreground, middle ground, and background of the image, the possibilities for orientation regarding size relationships remain limited. In representations like the “Euclid’s view of a cosmic swarm,” the scale is mainly defined by the text that accompanies the image. And while the image of the Perseus Cluster initially gives the impression that one is closer to the stars, the information that the bright points are not stars but galaxies pulls viewers back from the perceived proximity to these celestial bodies. Such interpretive openness also favors a certain aesthetic permeability between micro and macro worlds, as has been observed in various representations since the 19th century and continues today. A microscopic image of plankton against a black background would resonate in a certain way with a similar aesthetics as images of stars and galaxies against a black background. The visual and compositional ease with which one can move from the mesocosm of humanity to the macrocosm of the galactic universe and back to the microcosm of our molecular life foundations was demonstrated in the well-known experimental film “Powers of Ten” (1977, Charles and Ray Eames, USA). In the film, despite the fantastic journey from the unimaginable expanses of the macrocosm to the equally fantastic scales of the microcosm, a certain aesthetic similarity between both worlds pervades.

Materialities of the Invisible

The images of contemporary astrophysics navigate between the representationally distant poles of visibility and invisibility. Some phenomena can be observed with the naked eye: the night sky, the sun, the moon. Others, however, require vision aids such as telescopes. Here unfolds a range of different forms of visibility. While earthly telescopes magnify distant celestial bodies for the naked eye, other space telescopes like Hubble or James Webb create another form of visibility. They collect data that is translated into visual phenomena. Another step towards abstraction is offered by images like “Jupiter’s Collisions” and “Merging Black Holes” in this exhibition, which are “pure” visualizations. Yet even in such visualizations, one can distinguish between different forms of simulated visibility. While the visualization in the image “Exploring the Universe through Different Eyes” represents a theoretical optical visibility of surface phenomena of the physical world, the visualization in the mage “Jupiter’s Collisions” represents a kind of invisibility that is brought to fore visually—as a picture. The image shows the core of Jupiter and allows a fictional glimpse into the planet's interior. By granting a view into the interior of the physical body, it recalls the tradition of X-ray images.

The comparatively ghostly materiality has fascinated visual representation since the discovery of photography. In connection with devices such as microscopes, telescopes, or X-ray machines, photography promised to make invisible phenomena of the natural world visible. At the same time, this opened up a complex relationship with the supposedly documentary transparency of the medium. Especially with phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye, the mechanisms of image production suddenly become prominent. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, photography was furthermore attributed with the ability to make the invisible visible, even without devices like telescopes and microscopes. The “ghost photography” of the 19th century used the technique of double exposure to—so the claim—make the ghosts of the deceased appear in the image. While this historical circumstance is linked to a context far removed from contemporary astronomy, this anecdotal practice resorts to similar aesthetic affinities that we generally grant technical images, be they photographs or scientific simulations, to make something invisible visible for us. The difference is that nowadays the invisible phantoms that stimulate our imagination are more likely to be black holes.

Aesthetics of Emergence

The representation of concentric circles has a long tradition in astronomy. Until Copernicus, the Ptolemaic, geocentric worldview dominated. However, even Copernicus, who placed the sun at the center of the concentric circles, could not detach himself from the forms of the circles as planetary orbits: for these perfect forms conveyed a harmonious impression and were therefore associated with divine perfection. This historical connection of the harmonious with the divine also resonates in contemporary cosmic representations. The representation “The birth place of planets” particularly evokes the aesthetic tradition of rendering the notions of the deistic and the sublime. The concentric circles with a bright, luminous core seem to do more than merely reflect physical relations. Rather, they create the impression of something greater, a creation, the divine. In the contemporary context of visual art, one is reminded in this sense of the films of Terrence Malick, especially “Voyage of Time” (2016, USA). There, the filmmaker does not hesitate to connect the cosmic with the divine—especially in scenes where planets are formed, similar cultural-historical and cosmological ideas intersect and take shape reminiscent of “The birth place of planets”.

Apparatus and Contexts

Two images of Jupiter, “Jupiter's Northern Hemisphere” and “Jupiter as seen by JWST,” taken with two different devices, illustrate the malleable material aesthetics in astronomical images. The northern hemisphere of Jupiter shows the plastic quality of the planet. The shading suggests its three-dimensionality. In a way, this image also recalls the famous “Blue Marble.” The circular color surface thus functions as the smallest common denominator for a visual, pictorial representation of a planet. The possibility to shift meaning with color variation emphasizes the abstract character of celestial bodies in the image. In contrast, the image taken with the JWST appears much flatter, and the surface colors suggest a different materiality. The cloudiness of the planet, the instability, seems more pronounced here. The juxtaposition of these two images illustrates two principles of photography theory: on the one hand, that images require contextualization (Huberman), and on the other hand, that what they can show us is predetermined by the “categories of the apparatus” (Flusser). In this sense, even though it is the image of the same planet, it is perceived as such only through knowledge about it. In that, the images show us what their recording devices were programmed to capture.