Pas sur la Lune

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. Lire la suite…

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.

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

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.

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.

In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at “Dextre the Magnificent.” Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

– NASA, Astronomy Picture of the Day, «New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called “Dextre the Magnificent”».

Celestis, Inc.(www.celestis.com), the pioneer and global leader in Memorial Spaceflight, announced today that it has reached agreement with two companies to launch payloads containing human cremated remains to the surface of the Moon as soon as 2009.

– Celestis, Memorial Spaceflights, Luna Services, press release, March 26, 2008.

» Space burial (Wikipedia)

» Celestis (Wikipedia)

WASHINGTON – A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA’s Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. […] “Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts”, said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University in University Park, Pa. […] Read more…

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

» Sir Arthur C. Clark: 90th Birthday Reflections

February 29, 2008: NASA has obtained new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon’s south pole —a region the space agency is considering as a landing site when astronauts return to the Moon in the years ahead. […] read more…

– EPSTEIN, Mitch (1998). Untitled, New York, The City serie.

She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

God is the voice that says, “I am not here.”

– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 236.

She missed those nights with friends when you talk about everything. She hadn’t stayed in close touch and felt no guilt or need. There were hours of talk and laugher, bottles uncorked. She missed the comical midlife monologues of the clinically self-absorbed. The food ran out, the wine did not, and who was the little man in the red cravat who did sound effects from old submarine movies. She went out rarely now, went alone, did not stay late. She missed the autumn weekends at somebody’s country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on their haunches like figures in myth.

– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 190.  

– Kerry Skarbakka, Naked, 2002.

Philosopher Martin Heideggar described human existence as a process of perpetual falling, and it is the responsibility of each individual to catch ourselves from our own uncertainty.  [Lire la suite...] 

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduc.

She’s heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dandling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.

– DeLILLO, Don (2007). Falling Man, New York: Scribner, p. 33

» Voir aussi Man, Falling (infra)
» JUNOD, Tom (2003). «The Falling Man», Esquire, septembre.
» Photographies de Lyle Owerko
» «The Falling Man», article Wikipedia (anglais)

She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: TRANSIENTS. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words has done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsabilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and look once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.

 – DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New-York: Vintage Books, p. 207. 

She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its effort to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payment for family session and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical-supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized. Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photo she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the field of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a band of futurism based on filing procedure. To Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seems even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partition, opened up others, moved ou file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief. 

– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 18-19.

–Alfredo Jarr, Lament of the Image, 2002

Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometime much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoy jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstraction. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercial, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best serve by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English.  Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small grey bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy. He wondered if he’d become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred.  “Here, look. We’re here folks. The future has collapsed right on us. And what does it look like?”  “You made me almost jump.”  “It look like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It’s being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”  “Let me sleep, hey.”  “See, look, I’m saying. Just as I speak. I mean it’s this. We’re sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they’ve got their loft and their cameras and it gets shown because that’s the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It use to be people waved.”  “Good.”  “Right here. Ri’chere, ladies and genneman. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”     

– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York : Vintage Books, pp. 16-17.

Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something  to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things in oblivion. Colors. The name of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever. 

– McCARTHY, Cormac (2006). The Road, New York : Vintage, p. 88.