MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. – NASA released a newly restored 42-year-old image of Earth on Thursday. The Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft took the iconic photograph of Earth rising above the lunar surface in 1966. Using refurbished machinery and modern digital technology, NASA produced the image at a much higher resolution than was possible when it was originally taken. The data may help the next generation of explorers as NASA prepares to return to the moon. [Lire la suite]

» Voir aussi «The Moon View», New York Times, editorial, 18 novembre 2008.
» Earth rise, 1966

Que craindre d’un univers qui a la vacance comme arme et comme programme ?

 

– MURAY, Philippe (2005). Festivus Festivus, éd. Fayard, Paris, p. 14

» Voir également «Permanent Vacation»

En outre, déclara-t-il, ces poupées présentent l’avantage d’échapper à la pesanteur. Elles ignorent tout de l’inertie de la matière, cette propriété des plus antinomiques à la danse ; car la force qui les soulève est plus forte que celle qui les maintient à terre. Que ne donnerait pas notre bonne G. pour peser soixante livres de moins ou pour qu’un égal contrepoids lui viennent en aide lorsqu’elle exécute ses entrechats et ses pirouettes? Les poupées, comme les elfes, n’ont besoin du sol que pour l’effleurer, et ranimer l’élan de leurs membres sur cet obstacle provisoire ; nous-même en avons besoin pour nous reposer, et nous remettre des efforts de la danse ; moment qui, manifestement, n’est pas la danse et qu’il faut donc, autant que possible, éliminer.

– KLEIST, Heinrich von (1810). Sur le théâtre des marionnettes, [PDF] [English version]

In 1936 Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in Depression era Alabama. In 1979 in Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ photographs from the exhibition catalog “First and Last.” In 2001 Michael Mandiberg scanned these same photographs, and created AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com to facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age. [Lire la suite]

» Pierre Ménard a fait mieux / Pierre Menard did a better job
» Voir aussi l’oeuvre du photographe Richard Prince : Wikipedia page, official site.

– “It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,” he said. “Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principle much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big deal.’ Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particules.”

– “We’re doing all right.”

– “We,re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s like we’re flung back.”

– “We have heat, we have light.”

– “These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flint together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotid is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is pratically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen hundreds TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million  and a half lives?”

– ” ‘Boil your water,’ I’d tell them.”

– “Sure. What abour ‘Wash behind your ears.’ That’s about as good.”

– “I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.”

– “What is a radio ? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.”

– “There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.”

– “They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotid? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just float in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

– DeLILLO, Don ([1985] 1986). White Noise, New York: Penguin Books, pp. 147-149.

A Sudden Gust of Wind, Jeff Wall, 1993

The commercial arena has also registered photography’s elevated status. Last year, an Edward Steichen moonlit pond from 1904 set a record for a photograph at auction when it fetched $2.9 million at a Sotheby’s sale. Even in the context of the art-world bubble, that was eye-popping. Denise Bethel points out that in 1990, when she came to the Sotheby’s photographs department she now runs, the record at auction for a painting was held by a van Gogh portrait of Dr. Gachet, which sold that year for $82.5 million, and for a photograph by an Edward Weston study of a nautilus shell, which brought $115,000 in 1989. What has occurred since? “The record for a painting at auction today is Picasso’s ‘Boy With a Pipe,’ for $104 million,” she says. “Over 15 years, you have gone from $82.5 million to $104 million, which could just be inflation. In photographs, the record was set here at Sotheby’s with $2.9 million for a Steichen photograph. In 15 years, from $115,000 to $2.9 million — that’s not inflation. That gives you some idea of the explosion in photography.” The explosion continues: Earlier this month, Sotheby’s London set a new record by selling Andreas Gursky’s giant diptych of a 99-cent discount store for $3.3 million.

– LUBOW, Arthur (2007). «The Luminist», The New York Times, 25 février.

99 cents, Andreas Gursky, 1999

Andreas Gursky. Chromogenic color print.
6′ 9 1/2″ x 11′ (207 x 337 cm)
Lent by the artist, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York,
and Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne.
©2001 Andreas Gursky.

– SCHONAUER, David (2007). «The First $3M Photograph», PopPhoto.com, 7 mars.

The Pond Moonlight, by Edward Steichen, 1904

 – TOOTH, Roger (2006). «At $2.9m, Pond-Moonlight becomes world’s most expensive photograph», The Guardian, 15 février.

First television picture from space, TIROS 1 satellite, april 1, 1960.

The launch of TIROS I (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite) on April 1, 1960 marked the first day it became possible to observe the Earth’s weather conditions on a regular basis, over most of the world from the vantage point of outer space. [...] Read more
—Source: NOAASIS

View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946.

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful —the first pictures of Earth as seen from space. [...] read more
—Source: “The First Photo From Space” By Tony Reichhardt, Air & Space Magazine, November 1st, 2006.

Captain Ronald E. Evans (1933-1990) was a US Navy pilot and an Apollo astronaut. [...] Ronald Evans was command module pilot for the last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17. He accompanied astronauts Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan, and piloted the command module America in lunar orbit while Schmidt and Cernan descended to the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the lunar surface below. There they set up and operated science experiments and collected geological samples. While in orbit, Evans completed a range of scientific tasks. He recorded geological observations and, using hand-held cameras, photographed key lunar features. Read more

See also: Astronaut Bio: Ronald E. Evans, NASA

The world’s first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was transmitted to Earth by the United States Lunar Orbiter I and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain. This crescent of the Earth was photographed August 23, 1966 at 16:35 GMT when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit and just about to pass behind the Moon.
—Source: NASA

[December 29, 1968] This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Earth is about five degrees left of the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features on the left are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Height of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.
—Source: NASA

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts; Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders did a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8. Lovell said, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.

[William Anders] “For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

[Jim Lovell]

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”

[Frank Borman]

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

—And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you –all of you on the good Earth.”

—Source: The Apollo 8 Christmas Eve Broadcast, NASA.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.

Control Room: ”South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”

Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”

Control room: ”Right.”

Caller: ”If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”

Control: ”It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”

Caller: ”It’s in the air.”

Control: ”I will send someone up there now to check it out.”

Caller: ”OK.”

The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear.

Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”

Officer: ”Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”

– «Police say UFO was just the Moon», BBC News, 4 juillet 2008.

» Via Neatorama

» Dave Fleischer on Wikipedia
» Dancing on the Moon on IMDb

» More works inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

That it is so is a matter of experiential fact. But whether it is so or not is not a question to be settled by producing a microscope or telescope or any recondite observations of any kind. Its evidence stares us all in the face every hour of our lives. Nor is any ingenious reasoning needed to make it plain. If one does not see it, it is for the same reason that some men have not a sense of sin; and there is nothing for it but to be born again and become as a little child. If you do not see it, you have to look upon the world with new eyes. (CP 1.219, 1902)
The writer of a book can do nothing but set down the items of his thought. For the living thought, itself, in its entirety, the reader has to dig into his own soul. I think I have done my part, as well as I can. I am sorry to have left the reader an irksome chore before him. But he will find it worth the doing. (CP 1.221, 1902)

—Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-1935). Collected Papers Of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vol. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vols. 1–6 eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7–8 ed. Arthur Burks.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

– KIMMELMAN, Michael (2008). «Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82», New York Times, 14 mai.

and to think, after I’m gone
there will be more days for others, others days,
others night.
dogs walking, trees shaking in
the wind.

I won’t be leaving much.
something to read maybe.

a wild onion in the gutted
road.

Paris in the dark

– Charles Bukowski, A New War, 1997 in SOUNES, Howard (1998). Charles Bukowski. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Grove Press, New York.

liweiart.com

11 mars 1942 – Si j’essaie d’approfondir cette «honte prométhéenne», il me semble que son objet fondamental, l’«opprobre fondamental» qui donne à l’homme honte de lui-même, c’est son origine. T. a honte d’être devenu plutôt que d’avoir été fabriqué. Il a honte de devoir son existence – à la différence des produits qui, eux, sont irréprochables parce qu’ils ont été calculés dans les moindre détails – au processus aveugle, non calculé et ancestral de la procréation et de la naissance. Son déshonneur tient donc au fait d’«être né», à sa naissance qu’il estime triviale (exactement comme le ferait le biographe d’un fondateur de religion) pour cette seule raison qu’elle est une naissance. Mais il a honte du caractère obsolète de son origine, il a bien sûr également honte du résultat imparfait et inévitable de cette origine, en l’occurrence lui-même.

– ANDERS, Günther ([1956] 2002). L’Obsolescence de l’homme. Sur l’âme à l’époque de la deuxième révolution industrielle, éd. Encyclopédie des nuisances/Ivrea, Paris, p. 38.

Martijn Hendriks: Give Us Today Our Daily Terror, 2008 - ongoing. Exact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed. 2 min 14 sec excerpt from a single channel video, color, 119 minutes

At about 16,000-17,000 feet we came across a whole series of footprints in the snow, on the lower part of the glacier. There seemed to be two groups, one rather indistinct in outline leading on to the surrounding snowfields. The others were much more distinct with, in places, a markedly individual imprint etched in the 2- to 4-inch covering of snow. We had no means of measuring so after examining them [Eric] Shipton took four photographs: two of the indistinct prints with myself, my footprints, and rucksack beside them for comparison; the other two photographs were of one of the most detailed and distinct group of prints, with my ice ax for scale, and a second one with my booted foot. […] Read more…

– 2 avril 1968 : Première mondiale du film 2001: A Space Odyssey réalisé par Stanley Kubrick d’après un roman de Arthur C. Clarke. Le film était présenté au Uptown Theater (Washington, D.C.) dans sa version 70mm avec une trame sonore stéréo magnétique à six pistes.

– Voir aussi :
» Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40
» 1968: A Roadshow Odyssey
» Kubrick: A Marketing Odyssey
» 2001 : A Space Odyssey (Shrine)
» Kubrick.com
» 2001: A Space Odyssey – Internet Ressource Archive