Paulo Nespoli & Roland Miller: 'Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of The International Space Station'

 

All Images: Paulo Nespali & Roland Miller/Nespali/Guardian

My eye was irresistibly drawn to the images in this article in The Guardian newspaper, which cropped up recently.  They are drawn from a newly-published book, 'Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station' [1.], by Astronaut, Paulo Nespoli and Photographer, Roland Miller.  Having at least one astronaut on the team is, I guess, the only way the project could have been realised, when you think about it.

It occurs to me that, whilst our culture is saturated with atmospherically-lit, highly fictional visions of life in space, we rarely see how things really are up there.  The appeal of this project thus seems to lie in its pure documentary intent.  It offers a view of everyday reality here, at what is still the infancy of space exploration (not even beyond Earth's orbit - in fact), rather than the fantastic projections into the far future we are used to.

And what actually is up there, it transpires, is an environment of total functionality, in which every feature is there to perform a task, style or decor are irrelevant, and reason trumps all.  This shouldn't be a surprise really.  The ISS is a scientific facility, and a nexus of pure research.  At present, I imagine the only real reason for its highly specialised denizens to be there is to acertain to whether 'life in space' is even possible at all.  Perhaps only when that has been established - and some of the novelty of being there at all is taken for granted, will we begin to see some form of extra-terrestrial style emerging.  Once people can talk of making 'A life in space', rather than simply constituting 'life', in its baldest sense.

But, of course, no image can exist without containing its own aesthetic - be it intentional or otherwise.  Our eye and brain will construct it from whatever visual information is framed and presented.  The brilliant illumination flooding these scenes, is there to make every piece of equipment (and the information it represents) easily discernable and identifiable - no doubt.  What it also achieves is an almost overwhelming clutter of visual information, outlined in the crispest of detail.  What begins as a purely matter of fact situation, quickly becomes on of dazzling hyper-reality - it would seem.  This assumes that these are largely as-shot photographs, and not heavily Photoshop-manipulated confections, of course.  Whatever the reality, it's really no surprise that my own eye finds considerable sensory delight in all that layered, interlocking geometry, and the way that flashes of synthetic, often vivid, colour accent all those self-coloured neutrals.

Perhaps what delights me more than all of that, are those little glimpses of the mundane and the Everyday creeping into more than one of the depicted environments.  In particular, the presence of a plastic bucket, a hazard warning cone, and half-opened cardboard boxes complete with  bubble wrapped contents, all catch my eye.  Such characteristically Earth-bound details make me feel that my own daily experience is not so far removed from that of the people who work at the frontiers of space exploration, after all.

[1.]: Paulo Nespoli & Roland Miller, 'Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of The International Space Centre', Bologna, Damiani, 2020

Season's Greetings 2014

I'm not a complete Luddite, - I'm writing this after all.  However, I will admit to being more comfortable or intuitive with some forms of digital technology than others, - and have made no secret of my distaste for phones as devices for image-capture.  I find them too small, too light, and consequently, too prone to camera-shake.  I also find anything with a touch screen pretty frustrating, and am regularly tripped-up by the yawning shutter-lag (on my phone at least).

However, I am also aware that much of my regular photography is marked by a somewhat habitual formality, a heavy reliance on careful composition and exposure, (both in-camera, and in post production), and that it may be overly static and DSLR-centric in general.  

I certainly don't intend to put away the big Canon any time soon, but taking more experimental, and certainly more dynamic, still photos, through the windscreen of my moving car with a Digital Video camera, around this time last year, certainly persuaded me there's more than one way to skin a cat.

That's something that I was reminded of whilst viewing my friend, and fellow artist, Shaun Morris' recent phone-grabs of nocturnal lorry parks on his own blog, - full as they are of light bleeds and trails, imperfect exposures, and other visually interesting, random elements.

Inspired by Shaun's shots, and in search of a few festive photos with which to toast the season, I quickly harvested these phone images, on the way home from a last-minute Christmas shopping excursion, earlier this evening.  Apart from a little judicious cropping in a couple of them, everything you see is exactly as my phone grabbed it.  I certainly appreciate the rapidity with which working this way allowed me to get the post up, and also the quality of festivity-through-gritted-teeth-on-a-wet-December-evening that the images contain.  That certainly derives, in part, from my ham-fisted employment of a cheap device, - clearly up against its own technical limitations.  It also seems highly suited to the current state of Britain, in all its increasingly alienated austerity.  

All Images: Stocking Farm Estate, Leicester, December 2014

I realise this is all the kind of stuff most people have taken for granted for years, but I've never claimed to be an early adopter.  It also makes me realise that, even in an era when everyone is a prolific photographer by default, my own motives for taking photos may still differ from those of many around me, (perhaps everyone's vary, in reality).  Anyway, enough with the philosophising. It's time for a few days of unquestioning festivity.

Happy Christmas.

Old Motors

My Dad's 1960 350cc Velocette Viper

Last July I wrote a post about my late father's old Velocette Viper motorbike.  After his death, the bike was donated to the Lincolnshire Vintage Vehicle Society's Road Transport Museum in Lincoln where, after a full restoration, it has taken its place in the permanent collection.

Inside The Lincolnshire Road Transport Museum, With 1953 Reliant Regent
Goods Tricycle, (Centre).

The LVVS had an informal open day featuring many of their smaller vehicles recently, so I took the opportunity to have another look at the Velo along with many of the other interesting old vehicles on display.  It was good to see the bike in a place where he spent plenty of his evenings and weekends for many years.

1937 Ford V8 Shooting Break

1939 Jaguar SS

I'm not much of a petrolhead really but do enjoy looking at the sculptural forms and period engineering of these ageing machines.  There's something delightful about the automotive styling of an era before computer aided design, when aesthetics were pursued for reasons other than mere efficiency and micro-accountancy.  Certainly, it's impossible to imagine anyone ever producing again something as rakishly elegant as the immaculate SS Jaguar, or indeed, as charmingly eccentric as the three-wheeled Reliant plumber's van.

1954 Bedford CA Fire Brigade Van

Not Exactly A  Period Restoration But The Big Kid In Me Still Enjoys
Cars That Look Like Cartoons

The SS Jaguar Demonstrates Real Period Bling

Of course, what road transport may have lost in stylistic panache and individuality, it has gained in reliability and mechanical refinement.  Old British motorbikes were notorious for leaking oil like proverbial sieves.  It amuses me to see that my Dad's old Velo is no exception.

Why Would Anyone Abandon A Logo As Good As This?

...And Who Would Bother To Fit Chrome Hub Caps And 
Wheel Arch Panels On A Working Vehicle Today?

Ice Age 1: The Current Climate

Apologies, as once again I'm composing a post somewhat after an event.  I actually began writing this about a month ago as the exhibition 'Ice Age, The Arrival Of The Modern Mind' was opening at The British Museum.  Unsurprisingly, the BBC produced a piece of 'proper', informative T.V. to tie-in with, possibly, the most significant exhibition in some years.  This post began in response to it.

I don't watch much television these days but Andrew Graham-Dixon's 'Culture Show Special' on Ice Age Art proved both instructive and inspiring; sufficiently so that I quickly amended plans for a day in London and spent some considerable time in the actual exhibition.  For now I'll concentrate on my thoughts about the program, as originally intended.  Synchronicity of ideas always excites me and it connected rather startlingly with several other, superficially unrelated, issues that currently occupy my head space.

Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Ice Age Art, A Culture Show Special', BBC2:
A Mission To Educate & Inspire Indiscriminately

The program showed A.G-D. stumbling around various Spanish caves with a torch to reveal cave paintings before visiting the British Museum to marvel over sculptural artifacts as they were curated in London.  In a fascinating section, he also visited a German Experimental Archaeologist, named Wulf Hein, who spends his time researching the methods used to produce such items.  That gentleman may have one of the most specialized and engaging jobs in the world.

Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Ice Age Art, A Culture Show Special', BBC2

'Ice Age Art, Arrival Of The Modern Mind' Exhibition, British Museum, 2013

  

Amongst the show's wealth of information and amazement surrounding the sophistication of artworks produced over such vast timescales in the deep past, two specific points really struck a chord with me. In his introduction, our presenter stated…

"Everywhere you look in a great modern city like London, you're surrounded by evidence of man's extraordinary cultural achievements; his resourcefulness; his technology, but if you project yourself back through all the layers of the past, to our earliest history, you'll find that it all stems from one fundamental, extraordinary human attribute:  the desire, the impulse to create" [1.].

'Bison Cow', Zaryask, Russia, Mammoth Ivory & Red Ochre,
Approx. 22,000 Years Old

 Towards the end, contemporary sculptor and erstwhile anthropologist, Anthony Gormley pointed out that the Ice Age was a period when human populations were dwarfed by those of animals, for which their art shows such reverence, and seriously jeopardized by the harshness of their frozen living conditions.

"I think that we need to remember that Art was an essential tool, it wasn't just spears and scrapers, our populations were so small so threatened by ice; by immediate freezing over of all of the things that we need to sustain ourselves, that Art was the thing that provided the vehicle, imaginatively, for us to believe in our own survival" [2.].

Education Minister Michael Gove:  Somewhat Less Of A Mission To
Educate & Inspire Indiscriminately

 I was immediately prompted to reflect on the current public debate over The Coalition Government's proposed education reforms and Education Secretary Michael Gove's moves to devalue Creative Arts and Design-Technology subjects within the school curriculum and promotion of a narrow academic bias instead.  I won't get involved in an extended educational discussion here, (it could go on for some time).  Suffice it to say that his dangerous proposals strike me as perniciously short-sighted, particularly at a time when the full implications of successive British governments promoting banking and the non-productive service sector at the expense of manufacturing, innovation and a properly mixed economy are staring us in the face.

'Portrait Head' (L) & 'Mask' (R), Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic,  Mammoth
Ivory, 31, 000 - 27,000 Years Old.  The World's Oldest Known Portrait.

I value the Comprehensive State education I received in the 70s immensely and, ironically, might even agree that some of the basic, essential skills and knowledge I had access to back then have been sorely neglected or 'dumbed-down' in intervening years.  But to deny equal status to all facets of human achievement and to shape a curriculum through which less academically orientated students are frustrated or more imaginative and 'vocational' achievements devalued, (when did that label become so derided?), IS JUST PLAIN WRONG.  Gove's recent policy reverse over the proposed wonky EBacc qualification is welcome and received much media attention.  Sadly, I'm yet to be convinced that he, or the narrow interests he serves, have suddenly acquired anything like a holistic view of education, or that it will significantly alter the fundamental trend of his misguided reforms.

'Perforated Horse Head Adornment', Duruthy Cave, France,
Limestone, 13,800 - 13,500 Years Old

Many of the ancient artifacts under discussion are simultaneously utilitarian tools and exquisite artistic expressions. Furthermore, as Andrew Graham-Dixon revealed, they seem closely related to a profound ecological understanding, had an important social aspect, and even reveal the ability to respond musically and ritualistically to the physical environment.  It’s revealing that apparent specialists were permitted the time needed to refine them in the face of profound existential jeopardy.  Surely, it's powerful evidence of how inextricably linked and just how intrinsic to human existence the Arts, Technology and "the impulse to create"[3.], really are.  This stuff was part of what makes us human from the time we walked out of Africa.  To discard it now would be like willfully chopping off a limb.

'Flute', Hohne Fels Cave, Germany,  Vulture Wing Bone, 42,000 - 40,000
Years Old.  The World's Oldest Known Musical Instrument

'Decorative, Hooked End Of Weighted Spear Thrower (Mammoth)',
Montastruc, France, Reindeer Antler, 13,000 - 14,000 Years Old

Our own government seems to suggest that the only way to mend our failing economy, (and shore up an increasingly discredited ideology), is to construct an inequitable, nostalgic education model in which many of those very modes of thought needed to survive and prosper are neglected or snobbishly despised.  It seems ironic that the BBC's featured specialist in Ice Age manufacturing techniques is German.  He lives and works in a society that, apparently, gives equal status to academic knowledge, culture and manufacturing, and enjoys the most robust of all post-war European economies.  He hardly seemed like a duffer to me.  Get yourself down the British Museum Mr. Gove!

'Panel Of Hands', El Castillo Cave, Spain.  At Least 40,000 Years Old

I made a couple of other connections while watching 'The Culture Show'.  Both sprang from its depiction of the famous, prehistoric reverse-stenciled hand paintings in Spain's El Castillo Cave.  I find these fascinating and have already referred to them in a previous post when I made a link between them and a contemporary fragment of hand-printed street art that I found in a Leicester back street.

Negative Hand Prints, Ball Discs & Graffiti, Burleys Flyover, Leicester, 2013

The impulse to leave such marks obviously remains strong as more recent photographs of mine demonstrate.  While carrying out a 'psychographic' examination of a current favourite locale, I came across numerous handprints high up on the filthy concrete of an elevated road support. Being negative images, these are even closer in nature to the prehistoric examples and, being inaccessible to normal reach, must also have required both effort and collaboration to produce. (That the accompanying cock & balls motif lacks some of the sensitivity of prehistoric depictions suggests that we cannot risk any further neglect of artistic skills in our own schools). 

Negative Hand Prints, Ball Discs & Graffiti, Burley's Flyover, Leicester, 2013

And whilst on the subject of genital graffiti…

What is singularly intriguing about El Castillo's 'Panel Of Hands' is that their scale and finger length indicate they may have been female.  Later, in his program, A.G-D. showed us a remarkable cave of surreal water-sculpted complexity that contains apparent multiple depictions of female genitalia.  Is it possible that a female-dominated caste of artist was at work in prehistoric Spain?  Might even the shaping of limestone formations into strangely pelvic concavities and the numerous labia-like pictograms be spectacular celebrations of female fertility and sexuality; of the most fundamental mode of creation?  Please, tell me it's not all just pornographic doodling.

'Venus De Lespugue', Lespugue, France, Mammoth
Ivory, Approx. 23,000 Years Old

Jenny Saville, 'Propped', Oil On Canvas, 1992

Thinking about all this I was reminded of German painter George Baselitz's heavily reported (at the time)comment that women are unsuited to becoming great painters.  I'm hoping he was taken out of context, or merely performing a crass piece of self-publicity, and doesn't actually expect us to take him seriously.  Actually, Baselitz's conflation of market value with artistic success to prove his point suggests he has little of interest to say on the matter, (sadly, it also blows my theory about insightful, well-rounded Germans out of the water).  Either way, perhaps he should take a look at the 'Panel of Hands' then have a word with Jenny Saville, Fiona Rae and many others.

'Ice Age, Arrival Of The Modern Mind' runs until 26 May 2013 at The British Museum, London.  I would urge you to take a look if you have any interest at all in who and what we are.

[1.], [3.]:  Andrew Graham-Dixon, 'The Culture Show - Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special', BBC 2, First Broadcast: Saturday, 9 February 2013.

[2.]:  Anthony Gormley, 'The Culture Show - Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special', BBC 2, First Broadcast: Saturday, 9 February 2013.

Hand Painted

'Panel of Hands', El Castillo Cave, Spain.  Includes Hand Images
At Least 37,300 Years Old.  Photo: Pedro Suara (AAAS).

A news article about Palaeolithic cave painting caught my eye recently.  Using refined mass spectrometry techniques, a team including researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Barcelona have dated paintings at eleven Spanish sites much earlier than previously thought.  They measured elemental proportions in tiny samples of rock deposits adjacent to the paintings as described in a paper in 'Science', magazine, co-lead authored by Alistair Pike and Joao Zilhao.  I won’t pretend to understand the science but it’s described as both accurate and non-damaging to the ancient pigments.

Alistair Pike of The University of Bristol.  Photo: Marcos Garcia Diez

'Panel of Hands', El Castillo Cave, Spain.  Including Images of
Bison and Sprayed Discs.  Photo: Pedro Suara (AAAS).

Their findings undermine previous assumptions about the age of the earliest European artworks.  The oldest examples appear to date back to around 40.800 years ago putting them close to the earliest known records of modern Homo sapiens in Europe.  Seemingly, the hot debate in anthropological circles is now whether modern humans brought artistic behaviour with them from Africa and the Middle East, whether that behaviour accelerated as they came into direct competition with Neanderthals or whether Neanderthals themselves were involved in art practice.  The latter interpretation would undermine many established preconceptions about the supposedly primitive Neanderthals.  Could it be even possible that we learned the habit of Art from Neanderthals I wonder?

Sprayed Red Discs, El Castillo Cave, Spain.  Discs Like This Are At Least
40,600 Years Old At This Site.  Photo: Pedro Suara (AAAS).

I admit I’m pleased by this validation of painting as one of the earliest forms of human activity.  I’m also interested in the way many of the earliest images were apparently produced by blowing pigment around their hands to create negative shapes.  Positive hand-prints exist too and it’s possible to distinguish between males and females and to deduce that, as now, most people were right handed, (most of the prints show the free left hand).  It seems that even then, people were moved to spray onto walls to mark their identity or territory.

West End, Leicester, 2012

While I was thinking about this I remembered a couple of charming blue handprints I saw recently on a local wall and snuck out with the camera to record them.  Some things never go out of fashion.

Sources:

'U- Series of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain', A.W.G. Pike, D.L. Hoffmann, M Garcia-Diez, P.B. Pettitt, J. Alcolea, R. De Babin, C. Gonzalez-Sainz, C. De Las Heras, J.A. Lasheras, R. Montes, J. Zilhao, Science, 15.06.12

'Science: Cave Paintings From Paleolithic Spain Are Older Than Expected', Brandon Brynn, AAAS, June 2012