“Projecting Martian Photography” (longer seminar version)
Beginning with Christiaan Huygens’s sketches of faintly visible surface features in 1659, Mars has since undergone centuries of telescopic observation and cartographic projection. But it is photography that has most fully expressed the desire to experience this point of red light as an actual place. This talk is a brief portion of a larger paper on the development of Martian photography from Percival Lowell’s first telescopic photo prints that raised the “canal controversy” to a fever pitch in 1905, to current geographic information systems’ (GIS) rendering of digital satellite images as a unified, navigable space. With its increasing particularity and definition, at a remove from Earthly global totalities and yet dispersed through them, Martian photography narrates a deep history of cognition and virtual space.
But what makes this more than a story of developments in perspectivalism is the fact that this diverse image archive is organized according to the rationalized grid of Martian cartography. More interesting to me than the development of these images themselves is the construction of a continuity between them, a vast worldbuilding enterprise that has generated countless scientific and science fictional narratives. Ultimately, I will explore the implications of this term “Martian photography,” implying not photographs taken by Martians (though this is a topic that the paper explores), but a certain modality of photography borne out of a science fictional impulse to commune with otherworldly objects and landscapes, a configuration of the photographic apparatus that builds up hypothetical models, runs simulations, and then asks “what if” questions of its own methodology. Martian photography speculates not only about the future of planetary exploration or the ancient past of alien civilizations, but speculates also about the limits of photography and the possibilities inherent to the medium.
“My Flesh Was Not For Feasting On: History’s Objects in Beowulf“
Motion capture cinematography quite literally weaves information into the surfaces of materials, replacing objects with a digital skin that serves the dual purpose of transmission through immaterial data (rather than celluloid inscription) and increased economic valuation through an enhanced cinematic spectacle. This essay takes Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 Beowulf as the occasion for a comparison between the circulation of culture in the original epic poem’s gift economy and our own contemporary “information economy.” In Beowulf’s gift economy, where objects circulate through historical epochs and geographical regions, individual artifacts occupy a privileged position throughout the narrative in the transmission of historical knowledge and the circulation of material wealth. In the information economy, digital cinema provides both a neutral delivery system and a limitless plane of expansion for cinematic spectacle. While the intentionality behind Paramount Pictures’ pairing of an Anglo-Saxon epic with a state of the art cinematic apparatus was undoubtedly opportunistic, one cannot help but recall the poem’s linguistic ornamentation—lines such as Wearp ða wunden-mæl wrættum gebunden (The keen, inlaid, worm-loop-patterned steel… 983-986)—when watching the seductive glow of a digitally rendered artifact which had no material reality in the first place. This paper’s wager is that by juxtaposing an analysis of transmission and valuation in the digital Beowulf with an analysis of the same in the epic Beowulf, several productive parallels can be uncovered.
“Becoming-Film–A Brief Poetics of Trailers” [senior thesis]
With an emphasis on momentary combinations of atoms (sound effects, images, voiceover, graphic intertitles) over the construction of a coherent whole, the movie trailer’s constituent parts are heaped up and bleed into one another as a way of secreting some form of imagined film. This paper examines the features that allow the transition from atom to illusory whole as a way of asking how such a montage form acquires legibility and circulates through popular network environments.
“The Impossible Object of Endgame”
Explores the condition of the autonomous art object in a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Putting Beckett’s rare critical writings in conversation with the aesthetic theory of Michael Fried, this paper argues that through a perpetual sculpting action, Endgame approaches the impossible—a theater hypostatized as object.
