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Dark Sky

Everyday Science Fiction and the Mechanics of the Sky

Su Ballard
Eyeline 78/79
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The Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky reserve is four thousand three hundred square kilometres of New Zealand’s South Island recognised for the stability and transparency of its atmosphere, and the absence of light pollution. Standing at the Mount John observatory at night, the sky does not appear flat or black but an undulating and variegated grey mass. With the naked eye, the depth of space is overwhelming, vertiginous—everything seems in motion. Yet when reduced by a camera to a set of pixels, or silver halide crystals, the image captured loses scale and immersion. When sky becomes paper the stars strewn across its surface are equally flattened. They become informational points standing in for the experience of vision. Photographs struggle to capture the embodied observer, extending the duration of our perceptions, aggregating information before our eyes and extending it beyond the visible spectrum.

Photography constantly returns us to this question: what is modernity? Or more accurately; when was modernity? Measuring the sky was core to a Renaissance understanding of the location of the world within the universe. The horror of the telescope was the revelation of the impurity of the moon. Galileo had a hard task convincing people of the truth of his images. His observations of spots and imperfections on heavenly bodies were met with scepticism and a sense that these artefacts were malign. In the exhibition Dark Sky the modern age is ruled by the sky and modernity forms around the various technologies through which the stars are mapped, when humans step onto the surface of the moon, and the Atomic age.

The photographic lens offered a single eye through which the heavens could not only be observed but also... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Simon Ingram, Looking for the Waterhole, 2012

Simon Ingram, Looking for the Waterhole, 2012. Oil paint, canvas, robotics, computer, customised radio astronomy equipment, dimensions variable. Reproduced with permission of the artist and the Adam Art Gallery. 

Eric Lee-Johnson, Sputnik, c.1957

Eric Lee-Johnson, Sputnik, c.1957. Gelatin silver photograph (combination print), 289 x 242mm.