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„hard to believe it could ever have been like earth.“
tom kirby, commander of the pegasus mission, as their spacecraft leaves an orbit around venus
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„la peinture est morte!“
paul delaroche (1839) on the invention of photography
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„hallucination #1: ai will solve the climate crisis.“
naomi klein (2023)
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“you maniacs! you blew it up! damn you! goddamn you all to hell!”
astronaut colonel taylor (planet of the apes, 1968)
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suggested soundtrack
the chemical brothers. 2004. believe (press the button).
kenji kawai. 1995. ghost in the shell (film soundtrack).
the chemical brothers. 1995. exit planet dust.
gustav holst. 1917. venus, the bringer of peace (the planets).
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vernalia / chaleur obscure is a sister project of veneralia / consistent with the data and orbites improbables / magnificent desolation.
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footnotes
images made with the help of ‚stochastic parrots‘. no camera, film, sensor, darkroom … involved. software used: craiyon (c in the file name) and, in a few cases, dall-e (d in the file name), versions available in february and march 2023.
stanley kubrick: „i think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else.“
the crosshatches in the images are fiduciary marks or fiducials (‘trustworthy reference points’), analogous to the ones in photographs from the nasa apollo missions (made with modified hasselblad cameras).
‘chaleur obscure’ (dark heat) is how joseph fourier, mathematician and early climate scientist, called infrared radiation (1827).
photographs from the les délices du chaos website seem to be in the laion-5b dataset (probably used for training the text-to-image models used in this project).
thanks to ruedi widmer and his mayan nuclear power plant, rémi jaccard of strauhof for a guest lecture on literary climate fiction, andy fischli for ‘der grosse wagen’ and ‘residuum’ (both 2018) as well as information science thesards at hwz and hours of debates with students at eth zurich in spring 2023.
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references
jason m. allen. 2022. théâtre d’opéra spatial. digital artwork.
bbc / impossible pictures. 2004. space odyssey: voyage to the planets.
aimée de jongh. 2021. jours de sable. graphic novel.
boris eldagsen. 2023. the electrician (pseudomnesia). photograph.
caspar david friedrich. 1824. das eismeer. oil on canvas.
bernhard henin. 2021. imaging our solar system.
stephen r. kane, giada arney, david crisp et al. 2018. venus: the making of an uninhabitable world.
charles-ferdinand ramuz. 1922. présence de la mort.
oscar gustave reilander. 1856. the infant photography giving the painter an additional brush. photograph.
kim stanley robinson. 2020. the ministry for the future.
strauhof. 2022-2023. climate fiction. exhibition.
mathias théry. 2020. isaac asimov – l’étrange testament du père des robots. film.