John Stockton: June 2021

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/