John Stockton: 2021

13 June 2021

Utopias - 10

Landscape and Science Fiction

https://www.blurb.com/b/10762175-utopias-10-landscape-and-science-fiction

In the 1953 film It Came from Outer Space the main protagonists, John Putnam (an astronomy author) and his girlfriend Ellen Fields, are enjoying a romantic evening under the stars in Arizona when their conversation is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a fireball streaking across the sky. The apparition turns out to be a crashing spacecraft that has the power to destroy the Earth if humans interfere with it. Subsequent events follow the pattern of the formulaic science fiction film script described by Susan Sontag in her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster. After convincing the local citizens that they are in danger Putnam uses his skill and knowledge to save the day, and the aliens return to space. The bewildered witnesses are left with the familiarity of their everyday existence shattered.

Although the poster is in colour
the film was made with black
and white film and presented
as a stereoscopic anaglyph print.

What distinguishes post-1945 science fiction films from stories in magazines such as Amazing Stories and the radio drama Flash Gordon, is that the films are usually set in normal situations in which an alien invader arrives or some change in nature itself is brought about, often by an accident involving atomic power. If the threat is from outer space or results from scientists' hubris, it takes the form of destruction caused by unnatural creatures or a hitherto unknown process unleashed by a transgression of nature.

It Came From Outer Space is one of hundreds of similar films made in the two decades after the Second World War, and it is the events of the final year of that conflict that made them so different from 1930s science fiction. London and Antwerp had been bombarded by V2 rockets fired from German-held territory. These liquid-fuelled missiles came as a complete surprise to the public. Coming literally and metaphorically out of the blue, the V2 rocket was so advanced that a later derivative version launched the first American satellite in 1958. Another revelation was radar, which produced an uncanny electronic landscape image with perpetual night and no horizon.

1) 31st January - Explorer 1 satellite placed in orbit by a Juno 1 launch vehicle. The Satellite discover the Van Allen radiation belt.
2) V2 (A4) rocket prepared for launch at Cuxhaven in 1944.
3) Hurricane viewed on a radar-scope
4) 'Shadowgram' of atomic bomb victim in Hiroshima. The radiant heat from the detonation changed the surfaces of exposed objects, but the images of some people were preserved where their body had cast a shadow. When these pictures were released after the end of the Second World War it was thought that the deceased had been vaporised, but this is now thought to be unlikely. The uncanny nature of these photographs contributed to the post-war zeitgeist that inspired many science fiction films.

X-rays pictures are uncanny not just because they reveal what is normally hidden but because they are negative images in which structures are ghostly white shadows seemingly existing in a world of perpetual darkness. Similarly the original technology of radar is also uncanny, ahead of the sweeping beam there is a bleak, dark emptiness into which objects suddenly appear only to gradually fade, their presence briefly sustained by the electronic circuits that drive the cathode-ray screen - as if the darkness of extra-terrestrial space was revealed to extend downwards into our everyday lives. Modern radar presents a more acceptable computer-generated image can be rendered as a coloured moving map.

Although the last cavalry charge in history occurred in the Second World War the conflict ended with the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs that used the fundamental forces of nature. They were dropped from B29 aircraft that could touch the edge of the stratosphere. The bombs were triggered by barometric and radar fuses and the Nagasaki weapon used the artificial element Plutonium. In the post-war zeitgeist, the fantasies of Joules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs were replaced by more prescient stories which urgently indicated that the 'The Age of Improvement' industrial revolution paradigm was faltering.

The technology of the 20th Century was able to create uncanny images of nature and post- Second World War science suggested possibilities that were unsettling. The 1954 film Godzilla imagined destruction caused by a primal beast awoken by hydrogen bomb testing and in the same year Them! depicted monstrously enlarged ants mutated by atomic testing in New Mexico. Free from the restraints of seriousness that apply to art and literature, science fiction films were able to speculate about the changed relationship to nature brought about by science and technology. Whereas Godzilla and Them! employ their own versions of the technological sublime in there stories, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Les Yeux Sans Visage are inspired by the psychological phenomenon of the uncanny, as described by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay. The significance of post war science fiction films is that their stories draw from the technological sublime and the uncanny. They suggested that both nature and our human selves could be transformed.

In the 1950s science fiction films became the genre through which it was possible to speculate about our changed relationship with nature because established cultural forms, art, theatre and 'serious' literature, failed to respond to it. Journalism reported newsworthy science, but without scrutiny of the long-term cultural significance of its discoveries. Against the background of the consolidation of the post -war relationship between science and government, exhibitions such as the 1951 Festival of Britain and Gyorgy Kepes' book The New Landscape in Art and Science treated what is now regarded as the start of the Anthropocene as an extension of the latest stage of modernism.

1) River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl - Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
2) No. 46 [Black, Ochre, Red Over Red] - Mark Rothko (1957)
3) Typhoon south-east of Tokyo - photographed by the Tiros 5 satellite.

For over 200 years landscape art helped to create a shared appreciation of nature. By the end of the 19th Century civic pride demanded that every city in the developed world should have a public art gallery providing democratised access to art-forms

A figure concealed by foliage is revealed by
infra-red film. While the aesthetics of landscape
art and landscape photography remain
broadly similar, images of nature created by
science tend to be uncanny.

originally created for aristocrats. By the 1950s the art world was too occupied by the challenge of reconciling the aesthetics of the 19th century with modernism and abstract art to notice that knowledge from science was replacing familiar representations of nature with uncanny images. As for science museums, their mission was to try to make the uncanny familiar.

Art galleries and science museums were once major influences on the perception of nature. As well as being separate buildings, they owe aesthetic and intellectual allegiances to different institutions. Art galleries and science museums symbolise the division of the understanding of nature that was complete by the end of the 19th century. Subject areas in libraries confirm the separate identities of 'the two cultures' described by C.P. Snow. (2) Even today these differences are perpetuated by attitudes that are taught at the earliest ages in schools. Only the discipline of geography comes close to an understanding of landscapes that are created by a combination of work, biology, geology and entropy.

In science there is a putative separation between quantum physics and the older Newtonian 'classic' worldview that mirrors the supposed division of art into 'abstract' and 'figurative' practices. As 'classic' physics is still used in engineering and most science, so figurative art (including landscape pictures) is still popular a hundred years after Cubism. Actual landscapes that have historically (in landscape art) represented abstract ideas of beauty, the sublime and the picturesque are now altered by industry, agriculture and climate change. The transformation is like the uncanny aberrations of nature in science fiction.

Particles made visible

in a cloud chamber

In art, nature has been represented by landscape pictures and in science by mathematics. The work

of art might be a landscape painting and the scientific equivalent could be a set of data. A condensed form of a landscape painting might be a still-life picture and the science equivalent of this could be a photograph of the tracks of sub-atomic particles in a cloud-chamber. What does this mean for the role of art in relation to modern media? The popularity of the Blue Planet television series has been encouraged by digital screens that have put a cinema into every home. The vibrancy of their colour and the size of these screens are material determinants that have revolutionised 'nature' documentaries.

Nature can now be vicariously explored through video. It can be flown over, dived under and its events are stretched out by slow motion video or compressed by time-lapse photography. By comparison the landscape pictures lodged in permanent collections in public galleries around the world can seem quite moribund, but the new genre of 'infotainment' has not eliminated the divisive influence of art galleries and science museums. The binary perspectives of nature as wildlife and nature as physics remain in mass media. How will art react to our persistently ambiguous definition of 'nature' in the future?

Art now exists on a spectrum of engagement. At one end is the multi-millionaire who collects the work of 'pop star' artists and at the other end is the 'art worker' employed in community art or art therapy. From being a potential agent of social change, the Avant Garde has become a marketing vehicle for the high-end art market. The artists supplying this market are cast as philosopher-poets achieving insight through experimental and extended techniques. For the majority of art school graduates a career in community arts is a possibility - enabling the self-expression of individuals from challenging backgrounds. Between these extremes the more numerous consumers of art continue to receive the tradition of landscape art as 'heritage'.

1) Chloroplasts, the site of photosynthesis in plants. Genetic engineering could increase their
efficiency by 20% - creating the possibility of enhanced removal of C02 from the atmosphere.
2) Meat from cells cultured in a laboratory.
3) Thermonuclear fusion in the MAST 'spherical' tokamak at Culham in Oxfordshire.

We may be living during a 'hinge period' of history as revolutionary as the renaissance. The 20th century revealed hidden nature as if it were a dream, and the 21st century the means to undo the accidental changes brought about in nature could bring large areas of the world under artificial control. Just as renaissance art, exploration and science were related, so the Anthropocene era will require the cultural identity of nature to be a subject for art.

The 21st Century will be defined by climate change and the domination of ecosystems by agriculture (the Anthropocene) (3) and the ability to edit DNA, transform ecosystems and use energy from thermonuclear fusion to remove carbon dioxide from the air (the technological sublime). As societies face choices about climate change, synthetic biology and geoengineering, art will offer a contemplative space in which to consider evolving interactions of artificiality and nature. Equivalents to landscape art will emerge as the world becomes more like science fiction.

https://www.blurb.com/b/10762175-utopias-10-landscape-and-science-fiction

(1) Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement. London: Longman, 1959. Print. History of England (Longman ).

(2) Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print. Rede Lecture; 1959.

(3) https://futureearth.org/publications/anthropocene-magazine/

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/teams-engineer-complex-human-tissues-win-top-prizes-in-nasa-challenge

21 May 2021

Utopias - 9

On the 26th September 1991, a team of four men and four women, watched by international press and television reporters, sealed themselves into what was essentially a huge terrarium called Biosphere 2. Built over three years at a site in Oracle, Arizona, the project was expected to demonstrate that a working scale-model of the Earth's biosphere could sustain a space colony with not just food but also air and water. The air-tight environment was built on the scale of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. To emulate the

Biosphere 2. The sealed environment was
divided into sections called 'biomes' and
can be regarded as a research facility to
test the viability of future self- supporting
space colonies and as a conceptual
art project foregrounding the complexity
of our biological and agricultural world.

entirety of the biological world the 1.27 hectare enclosure was covered by a glass and steel space-frame and divided into areas; rain-forest, ocean (with a coral reef), mangrove marsh, savanna, fog desert and an agricultural area.

Biosphere 2 was the home for the volunteers for two years during which time they had to grow all their own food, undertake a host of scientific measurements and (paradoxically) maintain the wilderness areas. The atmosphere was monitored every 15 minutes by 2000 sensors and the entire artificial environment was controlled by a computer and a nearby 'mission control'. Periods of rain were programmed and artificial waves created in the 'ocean'. Distinct climatic zones were emulated in different sections by heating, cooling, drying and humidifying the air.

The Bios 3 underground
research facility in
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
Between 1972 and 1984 three
people were able to live in
the 315 cubic metre
sealed environment with
25 % of oxygen supplied
by algae and wheat plants.

The designers of Biosphere 2 attempted to encapsulate as many of the physical aspects of the Earth as possible. It was not the first experiment to use algae or plants to keep humans alive in a closed environment, but it was the first attempt at making a working model of the Earth's biosphere. In 1979 James Lovelock proposed that the totality of Earth systems form a self-regulating whole, which he named Gaia. (1) Although photosynthesising oxygen, Biosphere 2 could not maintain temperatures as Earth systems do, and so the project used extensive underground air-management systems run by a gas-powered energy unit.

Biosphere 2 was subsequently criticised for being unscientific because the 'biospherian' crew were not all qualified as scientists. This judgement ignored the fact that the first astronauts were test-pilots. The Skylab solar telescope was operated from 1973 to 1974 for hundreds of hours by astronauts who were not astronomers. It was also suggested that the project pursued a subjective 'new age' agenda. Some biospherians were from a performance background and they had previously worked with the designers of Biosphere 2, businessman and inventor Ed Bass and 'systems ecologist' John P. Allen, at a counter-cultural community known as the Synergia Ranch

The United States pavilion
at the Expo 67 fair in Quebec.
Buckminster Fuller pioneered
the use of geodesic domes as
efficient structures covering
the greatest volume with the
optimum about of material.

This overlapping of interests came from the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Ed Bass and John Allen were influenced by the concept of 'design science exploration' which resists categorisation as either architecture or engineering and emphasizes the application of ingenuity over the marshaling of huge resources. Instead of regarding Biosphere 2 as a single experiment that could succeed or fail, it is more appropriate to understand it as a laboratory for multiple investigations. (2) The project could even fit within the definition of art, as chosen by Susan Sontag.

In her 1965 essay One culture and the new sensibility. Sontag wrote that the function of art was "giving pleasure and educating conscience and sensibility." Biosphere 2 may sit at the end of a spectrum of creations that might be considered art. The situation of its occupants was similar to that of the crew of a submarine as they lived with a fixed volume of air. Their personal effects had to be vetted as soap, shampoo, paint or glue that contained chemicals that could accumulate in the air were not allowed. This issue, along with many others raised by living in a microcosm, commented on life in the real world. Biosphere 2 blurred the distinction between science, engineering and performance art.

1. The Intensive Agriculture Biome in which the 'biospherian' crew produced their food.
2. The display screen on which data from 2000 sensors was displayed.
3. Although the ambition of Biosphere 2 was to emulate the process by which oxygen is replenished in the air by plants, it was necessary to use extensive electrical and mechanical systems to control temperate, create rainfall, control salinity of water bodies, remove algae from the 'rivers' and 'seas', as well as pumping water. The systems were monitored by engineers in
a nearby control centre, but maintained by the isolating crew.
4. The wilderness area was also maintained by the crew, pointing towards the 21st century when even non-cultivated areas may need to be helped to adapt to climate change.

The single greatest achievement of Biosphere 2 was to clarify the relationship between people and the actual biosphere. By attempting to live in a minuscule version of the entirety of Earth systems, the project highlighted problems that we face today. Population growth has changed the ratio of space that is occupied by humans, relative to wilderness, so as to approach that of biosphere 2. We can no longer assume that waste is diluted by air and water to a level of insignificance. Human influence on Earth systems has increased to such a degree that we are now in a new geological era, the Anthropocene,

Diamond mining. From the
first creation of ceramics
26,000 years ago, exploitation
of resources has expanded
to such an extent that
humans can now be regarded
as a geological force.

Within the limited definition of nature that excludes physics it is evident that economic activity is the main cause of species extinction. Within the wider definition of nature that includes physics; the change to the heat balance of the Earth caused by industrial carbon dioxide and methane

Open cast mine in Bohemia.
Humans move more material
around the Earth than glaciers
and rivers.

emissions; and the discovery that humans move more material through mining, dredging and construction than the action of glaciers and rivers, means that humans are now a geological force on a planetary scale. During the first two 'missions' of biosphere 2 the crew had to manage every area of the space including the ocean, and the wilderness area. Their situation was similar to ours today.

The extent of environmental transformation and of global warming may require change not only to our modes of industry and agriculture but also the management of what used to be regarded as wilderness. Climate change may occur faster than plant species can migrate. The capacity to move bio-communities by transplanting species will be explored.(3) A more radical option would be to use CRISPR gene editing to adapt plants to new climates, or even increase the efficiency of photosynthesis so as to remove more carbon dioxide from the air. It is possible that we are already creating new species and driving evolution by changing environments.

An arena will open up between the permaculture ideal of leaving as little trace on the Earth as possible and the technological ethos of genetic editing and geoengineering projects to mitigate climate change. Biosphere 2 presaged today's need for nuanced consideration of the interaction between artifice and nature - art that is not 'moral journalism'. In the 20th century a shared conception of landscape fragmented as nature disappeared into the laboratory and artists ended the distinction between content and style. The cultural baggage of landscape art; the sublime, the picturesque, numinist and symbolist imagery, was largely forgotten.

TOP: Sub-atomic particles revealed in a bubble-chamber. The paths of the emerging particles are only partially constrained by the magnetic field within the walls of the chamber.

BOTTOM: Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock. His method of applying paint to a horizontal canvas on the floor of his studio created an 'all over' effect suggesting that the pictures are a small window on a greater field, seething with energy. Pollock's 'action' paintings often seem to resent the limiting borders of the canvas.

Since the Renaissance art and science have gradually drifted apart, with a few notable exceptions. For a few years in the period of impressionist painting it appeared that some artists' interests in the perception of colour overlapped with scientists' investigations of light. Some commentators have seen links between Einsteins theory of relativity and cubist art. Art came to concentrate more closely on subjective experiences as physics delved ever deeper into nature at the level of the sub-atomic. The divergence of art and science is illustrated by the Festival Pattern Group which was tasked with using images from x-ray crystallography to inspire work for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition. The studies that the group made resulted in designs they were used for craft and not art (as defined by contemporary art critics and galleries).

Jackson Pollock's belief that abstract expressionist painting resulted from a relationship between the creative process and fundamental aspects of nature relates to the title of Leo Szilard's paper "On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings". His paintings suggest the emergence of significant forms created from energy. Photographs of sub-atomic particles and Pollock's painting suggest the limitless and therefore sublime aspect of nature.

1. Michael Heizer - Double Negative - Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70.

2. Michael Heizer - displaced/replaced mass . Nevada. 1969

3. Michael Heizer - Circular Surface drawing - El Mirage Dry Lake, Mojave Desert, CA (ephemeral tracks created by motorcycle)

Land art constructions in the desert of the United States were a relisation of new directions in art that Susan Sontag described in her 1965 essay one culture and the new sensibility. Deliberately avoiding the emotional and cultural associations of landscape art, the constructions display a cool aloofness associated with conceptual art. Philosophers such as Hegel have argued that the beauty of ideas would eventually replace the need for visual art, but Land Art, while classifiable as conceptual art, escapes from this ideological cage by existing more as photographs and films/videos than pure ideas related by words. Pictures of land art constructions provide an aesthetic pleasure of their own, while the original creations continue to exist. Apart from ephemeral land art, the sites of these works can be regarded as both destinations for a pilgrimage and a touristic visitor attraction, like preserved Hollywood sets that become theme parks.

For art historians, the post-modern 'coolness' of the land art movement in the 1970s was full-stop to the genre of landscape art, but it took place against a background of political turmoil. Robert Smithson produced his project Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University in January 1970. Later that year on the campus nine students were shot and four were killed by members of the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest. The emergence of the environmental movement from the Vietnam War protests was stimulated by the use of defoliant chemicals to deny cover for the Vietcong army. The dioxin by-product in the 'agent orange' sprayed by aircraft over huge areas left a toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic legacy.

1. Partially buried woodshed - An early land art experiment created at Kent State University by Robert Smithson January 1970.
2. Kent state University 4th May 1970. Four students were killed and nine students were wounded by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam War protest.
3. Aircraft spraying 'agent orange' defoliant in Vietnam.

The unforeseen juxtaposition of Robert Smithson's partially buried woodshed and the shooting of thirteen students at Kent State University in the same year is a painful reminder that art does not operate in a vacuum, isolated from the society that ultimately funds it and provides an audience for it. The land art 'movement' of the 1970s was an implicit elision of landscape art that was associated with conservative values and privilege. Abstract art that occupied the attention of the art world between impressionism and the 1970s was influenced by the idea that aesthetic feelings for non-representational compositions arose from shared psychological processes, not dependent on race or class, that could contribute to 'universal' values that were implicitly socialist in nature. Before the Second World Was several abstract artists including Piet Mondrian and to a lesser extent Jackson Pollock took the idea of the psychological basis of creativity much further by involvement in the the quasi-religion Theosophy. Identifying the dividing line between mysticism and a poetic response to nature will remain a challenge for artists in the 21st century.

In this century thermonuclear fusion could generate enough electricity to sequester carbon dioxide from the air. On a scale far greater than the defoliation of trees in Vietnam, the project would reverse global warming and allow us to release the gas at the onset of a future ice-age. Having a hand on the world's thermostat, we would be essentially 'flying the planet'. In the 21st century art cannot be limited to the rhetoric of protest movements. It could elucidate what we mean by the word 'nature' in a world shaped by synthetic biology and geoengineering.

BRINGING BIOTECHNOLOGIES TO CONSERVATION

Living robots from skin cells

Artificial life made in a laboratory

1.Chloroplasts are the sites of photosynthesis in plants. They are controlled by genes that may be edited in the future so as to increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 20%.

2. Lancelot 'Capability' Brown championed the practice of creating idealised landscapes within the estates of wealthy landowners. The modification of landscapes to match the ideal of romanticised landscape paintings was eventually extended to great public parks such as Central Park in New York. In the 21st century it may be considered necessary to modify what is currently regarded as natural bio-communities so as to adapt them to climate change and extract more carbon dioxide from the air.

3. In 1952 Stanley Miller created compounds associated with living organisms by passing an electric charge through a flask containing a mixture of gasses created to emulate the atmosphere of the Earth soon after its formation.

4. After Stanley Miller's experiments created the basic building blocks of life it was briefly thought that life could be created in a 'second genesis' in the laboratory. This has proved to be beyond present capabilities, but radical modifications of existing cells with entirely synthesised genes has been accomplished. Although there is a large gap between Stanley Miller's creation of chemical precursors to life and the modification of existing cells, the cultural significance of the changing distinctions between naturally occurring systems and engineered systems will be a major subject for art in the 21st century.

Climate engineering