Programming the Tools of Photography
Royal Botanicals Gardens, Kew 1847
William Henri Fox Talbot: Why don’t you use my process to record plants?
William Jackson Hooker: This would be good for copying drawings of plants, and no good for making an image of a plant that brings out what a botanist wants to know.
It would be more suitable to reproduce drawings of plants, bringing out what a botanist wants to know. Photography pics up things we cannot see, something to faint, extending into invisible radiations. It intervenes with space and time, and makes the past present the hole time. It could however – possibly reveal distant unexplored regions in astronomy …
Din Tai Fung, Glendale 2022
A Catalog of 123,663 Stars Brighter than 9th Magnitude as Viewed From 55 Cancri e
In 2012, exoplanet 55 Cancre e made mainstream news as a celestial body possibly composed of molten carbon with a core made of diamond. This, of course, piqued the public’s imagination, leading to the projection of fantasies and desires upon the exoplanet. In this catalogue, the view is reversed. A two-thousand-page catalog lists stars as seen from exoplanet 55 Cancre e. Employing the near totality of archived stars (SINBAD database), astronomer Eric Mamajek calculated the positions of these stars as viewed from our constructed speculative position.
Today, 55 Cancre e’s diamond core has become less and less certain with each new scientific revelation about the exoplanet. But we still can dream of expansive plenitude.
