From Our Archives: Michael Benson
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
This interview was originally featured in Issue No. 15 — Place.
ANDREA: In Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System you alter the colors of the images you get. What is the process of composing the images and manipulating the colors?
MICHAEL: That’s not exactly right. What I do is take raw source images from the Planetary Science Archives, which almost invariably come in the form of black and white, raw frames, and work them in Photoshop and other processing platforms, constructing final print files by compositing im- ages to get color – if a color image is in fact the intent – and then putting a mosaic of the frames together to get wider-field views. Color can be achieved when two or more of the black and white source frames of the same subject have been shot through different filters within the visible spectrum, for example blue and red. So, if say, the Northeastern quadrant of Saturn was shot in red, green, and blue filters, producing three frames imaged within the same few minutes, they can be stacked in Photoshop, assigned their place in the visible spectrum, and produce an RGB composite. And if the spacecraft did the same thing in the Northwest quadrant, then Southeast and Southwest, you can produce a global image with those four composite color frames after a certain amount of work. So, I’m only “altering the color” if you mean using existing black and white frames shot through different filters to produce a color composite. You’re right that it’s no longer black and white material, but I didn’t just make up the color. It’s built into the material. As for composing, it all depends on how much material there is to work with. Usually, a composition suggests itself if the source images are of interest in the first place.
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
ANDREA: How does your cinematic work influence your photographic series?
MICHAEL: Well, I tend to think cinematically, particularly when sequencing images – meaning I’d like to think I know how to tell a story in purely visual terms. Using cinematic vocabulary – such as wide shots, medium shots and close ups – that syntax helps people understand where they are and what’s going on. It’s certainly useful in sequencing books; it also makes all the difference in exhibitions. But there’s another aspect that’s interesting, and that’s the way time can kind of worm its way into the process. Andrei Tarkovsky called filmmaking, “sculpting in time.” With some of the images I’m putting together, several days of observations can all find their way into the same single, final composite image. So the old paradigm of a photo being a single moment in time when the shutter falls is sort of supplanted – replaced by a more cinematic logic, even if it’s encoded within a static im- age. Sometimes you can sort of sense time pulsing within a static image. Last week I was in Vienna, and went to look at the Bruegels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as I always do when I’m in Vienna. Those paintings are like feature films, each on its own big canvas. There’s a lot of time unfolding in them. It’s proto-cinema. And with some of these planetary images, time is also compressed within a single frame. I don’t mean to compare this work to Bruegel otherwise, of course. Just to link the phenomenon of time unfolding within an apparently static image.
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
ANDREA: Where do you set the boundary between artistic and scientific photographs?
MICHAEL: In terms of a general principle, I don’t have a formula. In terms of how I personally view it, again, it’s very subjective and has to do with whether it has the ability to acquire a resonance or a set of resonances. If it can sort of vibrate and transmit a sense of...let’s call it wonder for want of a better word, or a sense of awe or simply surprise, with its ability to be simultaneously photo-realistic and abstract – there are a number of images that I’ve discovered that seem to be both at the same time – then maybe you’re getting somewhere. You’ve moved from the purely scientific into another category.
But if you simply reach into the grab-bag of a hundred thousand raw frames and pull one out and dump it on the table, it’s probably not going to be “artistic,” whatever that term means. Though, it’s indubitably a found object. But if you really work the problem, and reconnoiter in these huge databases, you can find the material. When you have several million frames in total in the database, you’re really walking around in a kind of outside-in universe, and your freedom of navigation is pretty wide. So the boundary is set through choosing, editing, processing, compositing, printing, and so on. You have to add the subjective human element to the archive of images acquired for scientific research purposes. And as I said before, you’re repurposing it.
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
ANDREA: How have your perceptions of space changed since you focused your art on it?
MICHAEL: Well apart from the purely visual side – meaning apart from becoming better acquainted with the visual woof and warp of these places – a succession of book deadlines has forced me to get my act together when it comes to understanding a lot of things that I might have been too lazy to figure out if I didn’t have that motivation. Because I’m also writing about this stuff, you know. Nothing settles a man’s mind like the knowledge that he’ll be executed in the morning; that’s what a deadline is like. There’s a great New Yorker cartoon – a guy is in his office at his laptop writ- ing and a faceless, hooded figure with a big scythe is entering the room. The guy doesn’t even raise his eyes from the screen, and says, “Thank goodness you’re here – I can’t accomplish anything unless I have a deadline.”
I also have a better understanding of how incredible something rather than nothing is. There’s a hell of a lot of nothing, and only a very little something, at least to human perception. So any something is amazing and valuable, and worth looking at, particularly when the alternative is a hard vacuum and nothing much else going on. In the same way that an island, however small, is a remarkable thing when you’re at sea for weeks with no sight of any land.
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
ANDREA: Can you give us any insights into Nanocosmos?
MICHAEL: It’s an investigation of natural design at submillimeter scales using scanning electron microscopes. I did initial proof of concept at the Center of Bits and At- oms at the MIT Media Lab from 2013-14, then moved back down here and did more work at the Analytical Research Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Then I ran out of grant money, and now I have an opportunity to move forward on the project again in Manhattan, but can’t really be specific on that yet because the agreement isn’t signed yet. I’m still a Visiting Scholar at the Media Lab, and plan to go back there later in the project and work on making some three dimensional objects based on the electron micrographs I’m producing. I hope to show all this in gallery and museum contexts eventually.
ANDREA: What else can we expect to see from you in the near future?
MICHAEL: I’m cooking up a book of trade nonfiction that my agent, Sarah Lazin, will be shopping to various publishers this summer. It’s outside of visual art production entirely. Essentially, I tend to use the medium that best suits my obsession of the moment. If I get the deal, I will spend a good part of 2016-2017 working on that. And this November I’ll have my first solo show in a commercial gallery in London, at Flowers Gallery on Cork Street. So I’m working on new pieces for that.
Courtesy of NASA STEREO Project/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.
To view the full interview, visit Issue No. 15 — Place.
