As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the "thats the way, I like it" song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.
Despite the report's several bogus or grandiose claims--that landscape images of Mars are "becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary," that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red--there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer's experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, "Actually there's nothing in this picture that isn't rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery."
Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it's as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.
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3 comments:
50 words for snow, but no word for love. :(
I am so sad.
If you don't have any words for love, I don't see how your argument makes any sense. Seriously dude.
I'm especially excited by the image "Mosaics: Uphill" that I found deep in the photo links you posted. What interests me most is the word, the title of the picture, "Uphill". Martian terrain--what seems both a real and unreal space--begins here to take on a kind of earthly identity. The photo's title informs very clearly--we are looking at a hill. It is as if the photo's title not only forces the mysterious terrain into an identifiable human thing being that this space is an "uphill" or is moving in such motion,--as if one were looking to the Rockies or perhaps a large farming pasture from out their window--but this photo also places the spectator and spectators in an area of confinement--we must look uphill. The language outside of the shot controls the space we imagine--extraterrestrial becomes terrestrial by one word and, perhaps, it becomes something else also. In this moment of construction where we, as you say, "imagine", the viewing public becomes a collective body of uphill travelers--the hill becomes the object of conquest.
There seems nothing in this shot, as the interview points out of another shot, that is explicitly human or earthly, but the need persists to look at it, at least by this accident in language, as something not-so-foreign, something, perhaps, just beyond the glass window, the hill in the distance.
@Nick: I think the planet you're looking for is Venus my friend. On Mars they just kill people.
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