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Seminar für Filmwissenschaft

Cosmic Images: Astral Aesthetics in Film and Photography

Jelena Rakin, Dr. phil.
Habilitationsprojekt

The project examines astrophotography and non-fiction films of the cosmos from the standpoint of aesthetics, film-photographic theories of image, and philosophies of technology. Although the project takes a diachronic approach, the focus of this examination lies specifically on three historical periods of image generation in astronomy and space exploration: the emergence of the photographic and cinematic dispositif at the end of the nineteenth century; the first non-geocentric images obtained owing to rocket-borne cameras in the mid-twentieth century; and finally, the transition to digital imaging and the placement of space telescopes in Earth’s orbit at the end of the twentieth century.
These different periods and technological dispositifs are unified by the same framing questions of the relation and interdependence between the documentary status of cosmic images and the discernable aestheticization of science and space conquest. The aesthetic parameters employed here for the examination of the images are notably the categories of indexicality and of dynamics that assumes the form of perception connected to (machine) movement and territory. The central place of technology in both categories of indexicality and dynamics underlines the tension between the sense perception and the mathematizing principles in the generation of cosmic images.  
In terms of indexicality, different manifestations of a disputable ‘automatic’ character of image production are taken into consideration: from the graphic printers’ manual interferences into photographic prints around 1900 to composite, hybrid images and categories as ‘false color’ in the contemporary digital context of astronomy. It is precisely the contingency of the indexicality, i.e. of the automatism of the (optical) apparatus in producing technical images of the cosmos – made prominent by the hybrid mode of image generation – that allows for the interventions that can be considered of an aesthetic nature.
The aesthetic singularity of images of the cosmos is furthermore evident in the particular relation of the movement to the temporal and spatial parameters of physical reality as represented within the picture frame – namely in the specific manifestation of dynamics as visuality. Moreover, since the cosmos as referent of the film-photographic image is not subject to the comparably direct sensory and physical experience of the terrestrial environment, the translation of its spatial dimensions into the formats of film and photography invites the revision of classical aesthetic categories such as perspective in relation to human scale. The representational rendering of phenomenologically indeterminable and infinite cosmic space into a finite frame and surface on the one hand, and rendering visible of anthropocentrically non-perceivable time/motion phenomena on the other hand, result in images that diverge from forms of the film-photographic mediation that traditionally assume anthropocentric sensory perception as their starting point.
Thus, fluctuating between the scientific measurement and the aesthetic knowledge,
film-photographic images of the cosmos call for a re-examination of the fundamental parameters of traditional aesthetics in relationship to visual representation and meaning-making, while they at the same time indicate to the pertinence of aesthetic categories in the visualization of science and space exploration.