Fata Morgana and Other Optical Phenomena
Text by Anja Wiesinger
In 2009 we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Enthusiasm for travel to planets afar remains unbroken, and continuous advances in technology are employed in reaching this goal. We witness an ever-increasing use of imagery for providing evidence of newfound knowledge and truths. Scientific tools promise deeper insights at both the micro and macro levels, bringing to life images that could otherwise never be seen by the human eye. All of this is applied to the exploration of the sources of our universe. Traces and records of sounds and stars, which existed at the beginning of fathomable time, are aggressively sought out and turned into knowledge. Science has become the keeper of this knowledge. The truth is close enough to grasp within one’s point of view. To these ends, it seems that the rationalist sovereignty of the visual sense has won at last. But, a critical approach to the use of images is all but met in science today.
According to Kant, illusions strengthen the mind - but he surely couldn’t have imagined that people would produce images of the universe with mega telescopes. And, as per Vilém Flusser, we lost our control over the power of images. In the Eighties, he noted: “The omnipresent technical images have begun magically to restructure "reality" into an image-like scenario. What is involved here is a kind of oblivion. Man forgets that he produces images in order to find his way in the world; he now tries to find his way within images. He no longer deciphers his own images, but lives in their function. Imagination has become.”
The film "Fata Morgana - and Other Optical Phenomena" by artist Connie Mendoza is part of a larger project which explores the perception of time. The piece deals with three different types of “magical” images, each related to a specific time/space mode. The first type is made by the camera itself, which captures a schizophrenic view of the world; the second comes from photo material from the artist’s childhood; and the third from scientific images. The material - digital video, analog photography, and visual representation of numerical data – is connected to the present, past, and future, all of which overlap in the piece.
The artist’s only guides were the photographs taken by her father in the Seventies, when she was a preschool child. The family was later exiled to Spain. Equipped with her father’s memories, she traveled to Chile in a return to places of which she herself has no recollection.
Still from Fata Morgana
Structured according to a countdown, descending from 10 to 0, this piece references Fritz Lang’s “The Woman in the Moon.” Lang wrote film history when he implemented the countdown to illustrate the end, or rather, the beginning marked by the lift off of the starship. Although Mendoza’s countdown suggests a linear timeline from past to present, other modes of time are applied in the editing, such as time reversion and jumps. Time circulates de facto between Earth and outer space, with the astronaut - the agent for the human being - linking these two spheres.
Each section of the film depicts a specific place, connected to an optical phenomenon. One could call these mind maps. They are introduced by written definitions of these optical illusions, the first being Mining/Fata Morgana - Fata morgana is a superior mirage which results from a temperature inversion.
This introduces the film’s point of departure: the world’s largest copper mine, Chuquicamata, where her father worked as an engineer in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The mine was founded in the middle of the desert by Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1917 and is still active today. (Without copper, there would be no Guggenheim art empire.) The viewer witnesses an explosion of the mine in 1973, the same year that President Salvador Allende was removed from power by Pinochet’s military coup. In the following picture, the camera captures a rocky desert landscape, which recalls the surface of the Moon. In accompaniment to the imagery, the o-tone of Allende’s 1972 speech to the UNO is played, revealing a statement made just a few months before the putsch.
The copper mine. Still from Fata Morgana
He speaks of the nationalization of the copper industry, which had been crucial for Chile’s economic independence, and of the threat by the western capitalist states.
As the movie makes clear, copper is inexorably linked to the history of Chile. Discovery of the resource initiated the country’s industrialization, along with its increased dependence on the USA, which owned and controlled the mines. When the mines were nationalized under Allende’s governance, IBM and ITT helped the dissident parties to overthrow his power.
Allende built the first and only socialist internet, Project Cybersyn, using copper to construct a secret communication system that could work independently of the mistrusted military. Today, and more than ever, copper is an essential resource for the computer industry. Mendoza sees a new form of scientific colonialism arising with the territorialization of the Atacama Desert by the space research endeavor called ALMA - the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Both copper and space research are controlled by capitalist states that absorb and export profit and knowledge.
We next follow the camera high up the Chajnantor Plateau to the ALMA site. Observatory/Diffraction – Diffraction is normally taken to refer to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle. We look inside the US American observatory hangar, where the body of one antenna is hanging, not yet functional.
Aerial view of the copper mine. Nasa image.
The ALMA area is located on the Chajnantor plateau, where 66 antennas are currently being installed. ALMA is an international collaboration between the USA, Europe and Japan. Not far away from the Large Millimeter Array, the Very Large Telescope project is already in operation.
American Antenna. Still from Fata Morgana
Technologies for the measurement of the universe are distinguished by their superlatives. ALMA seeks to measure radio waves, which are invisible to the human eye. Its telescopes are able to receive radiation at long wavelengths from low energy, astronomic objects – objects which have yet to form. In order to achieve results comparable to the ALMA antennas, a single telescope the size of an 80 kilometer-area would be needed.
The project’s primary goal is the exploration of the universe’s source. How do stars form? How has the galaxy evolved? And when did the universe begin? Those questions naturally imply belief in the Big Bang hypothesis and thus willingness to see its proof in images.
ALMA’s basic subordinate aim is to get rid of the blur. Until recently, telescope-produced images could only show stars in nearby galaxies with all their surrounding stardust. In this sense, ALMA is no technological revolution; but the progress lies in the tiny differences: exact temperature measurements, exact millimeter declaration and the recording of anything beyond the human senses. The production of images out of numeric data is fairly simple. The data received from the antenna field is translated into pixels and colored in a final procedure. It is a bit like painting by numbers.
The generation of evidence from visual information is a fairly new field in the sciences. Image ambiguity functions as a tool for imagination about the world, on one hand, while obstructing this on the other hand. Recalling Flusser’s thesis, images are always abstractions and truncations of time-space to a two-dimensional surface, allowing for the necessary vacuum of interpretation.
For Mendoza, Chile seems to be as far away as the Moon. Her mission was to comprehend her father’s narrative according to the photo material memories that she inherited. These are views of a past of which she has no memory, but of which she lives the consequences, nonetheless. The photographs serve as numerical data, in their own right, like the images generated by the ALMA telescopes. Images are nothing without an observer to make meaning of them. In addition, in Fata Morgana, the multiple producers of the images remain unknown. The camera changes between an objective, static and an active, subjective view, sometimes disappearing altogether, thus negating what is in front of the lenses. It scans photographs but fails to reclaim more depth from their surfaces. Images are, by definition, illusions, as they show something that is not present. The more one tries to capture within an image, the wider the gap between the image and its referent grows. The landscapes’ (and the concepts’) dimensions are just too gigantic for the screen.
The conviction that images speak for themselves – despite all knowledge of the manipulative nature of digital imaging - is persistent in our time. With mega calculators, men will continue to handle data and produce images that are well beyond our imaginations. In the process, the dependence upon technology and its results will grow, along with our belief in what technology and its results have proclaimed as true.
In this context, Mendoza creates a space for non-knowledge or for the possibility of a science that is independent of what we have been educated to understand. She critiques that the dominance of western science simultaneously usurps and disqualifies other cultures of knowledge. It is nevertheless a human need to explore and to reach for the foreign, for the origins, for the non-space and for death. This is common to all cultures: the search for the source of our existence and for an understanding of the nothingness that preceded us.
Still from Fata Morgana
Desert / Mirage - Mirage is a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects. A long sequence of a moon-still functions almost as a mirror image of the desert, which symbolizes nothingness - a non-space, like the moon, where life cannot exist. 5000 meters up, the air is deadly dry and lacking oxygen. One feels pressure on the chest. Yet, the desert’s clean air and the endless views cause distances to vanish, and one is set into a state of trance where it is possible to feel infiniteness. A final shot depicts a human body and its long shadow thrown on a distinct horizon line, dividing earth and sky.
These images play out a total disintegration of the borders of human common sense. Then, the movie finishes with a close up of the first female astronaut, , hidden in a helmet. Then the screen remains black for long seconds. Not only does this sequence transport the uncanny feeling that Man’s quest for discovery and for truth has thrown him back into his own existence, but also that he has failed to break free of it. Astronaut / Hallucination - Hallucination is a perception in the absence of a stimulus.
Mendoza’s piece points to the question of who has sovereignty over imagery, and in the service of which “truth”? If an awareness of methodology is the crucial matter in forming and establishing scientific disciplines, what, then, are the essential settings for art and science and for their relation to one another? The forthcoming battle has not yet been decided. Nor has the direction of its course. Even if it seems that science appropriates the traditional fields of art and philosophy, this will, hopefully, not lead to the end of both. Yet again, it would not be the first time that such a claim has been made.
Still from Fata Morgana
''Numerical Desert'', a section of Mendoza'sAlma Project, was shown at Festival @rt Outsiders, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris from September 9 to October 11, 2009.