Between September 2006 and March 2007, I conducted field research to collect a body of images of astrophysicists, and, more importantly, the environments in which they work. This work culminated in a PowerPoint presentation entitled Five Stages of Observation, which attempts to analyze the process of observation as a whole, using astrophysics as an exemplar.

In my studies of both photography and astronomy, I have found that at both of their most basic cores lies the observation, and further, the analysis, transcription and cataloging of only light. Thus, I have used photography to describe the methods by which astrophysicists attempt to understand something from light. However, the photographs do not exist as printed objects, but rather as a succession of images that are projected as only light themselves.

The presentation consists of several discreet elements. One is the Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (OSETI), which scans the sky every night in small sections. It looks for laser signals, which would appear brighter than stars, in the hope that this may be a communiqué from a distant civilization.

Another location and element of the presentation is a series of images of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. The AAVSO is an archive, which catalogs observations of stars that vary in brightness. It was founded in 1911, but has archives dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. It receives variable star observations from around the world and catalogs this numerical data. It is their sequencing and their final visual reinterpretation as statistical models that interests the astronomer.

The OSETI is a tiny, two room house on a mountaintop: there is only the control room and the telescope. The AAVSO appears to be a regular office building. Only its collection of data and the functions performed there are what characterize it. To the astronomers who work inside of these buildings, the interior space is of no consequence; it merely provides access to the infinite realm of stars outside. The images of the OSETI and AAVSO are taken with a 4x5” view camera and are meant to be formal studies of the interiors, which attempt to capture the quality of light, clutter, and essentially the claustrophobia of these places in contrast to the vastness they are meant to study.

In contrast to this method of photographing are a series of photographs in various juxtapositions taken at various lectures in the Tufts/Harvard CfA/MIT Joint Cosmology Seminar series. These lectures, I believe, are highly important in the process of knowledge transmission, analysis and challenging, and ultimately lead to fact creation. Their form also shapes, though does not govern, the narrative logic of my presentation. Five Stages of Observation attempts to reshape the rhetorical model of the PowerPoint presentation into a broader analytical model.

The final element of Five Stages of Observation is a series of images photographed from the NASA television channel. These images depict a number of mechanical arms that glow in the darkness of space, a lecture discussing possible research to be conducted on the moon, ground control of the International Space Station, and finally, a female astronaut inside of the ISS. These images are meant to guide the presentation and constantly provide a reference point to an obviously mediated image. By having the presentation begin and end with these abstracted, glowing images is to categorize them as the sublime. However, the sublime is always shown through the gaze of NASA, and even when a human can finally reach the heavens, she is still in a space as small and entropic as those on the ground looking up.






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