ars astronautica texts and articles

Art On Earth Seen From Space

Arthur Woods
2001-2008

To date, only two artists have succeeded in producing artworks on Earth that were meant to be "seen" from the perspective of space.

 
Tom Van Sant: Reflections from Earth

Reflections from Earth is the world's largest human-made image, made by environmental artist Tom Van Sant for the Los Angeles bicentennial in 1980. He and his crew set up a series of mirrors over a 1.5 mile stretch of the Mojave Desert in the shape of an eye.These mirrors were small (allegedly about 1 foot square), with precise adjustments on them for aiming. The artist expected that if the sun was reflected directly into the camera of a Landsat satellite, it would entirely overexpose that region of the image. Taking into account the exact position of the sun and the exact trajectory of the Landsat satellite, the mirrors were perfectly adjusted to aim the sun at precisely the proper angle to hit the camera.

The art is in the public domain. Van Sant tells a story of phoning the Landsat photo office to order that particular photo, giving the Landsat image data, and hearing the surprise in the voice at the other end exclaiming "why there's an eye in this picture!" and saying that he and his team made that eye as an art project.

Pierre Comte: Signature Terre

French artist Pierre Comte used sixteen squares of black plastic fabric with sides measuring 60m were used to create the “Planet Earth” symbol that covers an area of 390,000 square metres (780 x 500m). The installation was performed with the help of thirty people who manoeuvred 10-m-wide plastic rollers along a path traced on the ground by surveyors. Great difficulty was encountered when the 10 x 60m strips of plastic caught the wind. They had been anchored at each end, but hundreds of used tyres had to be distributed over their surface to keep them flat on the ground. The symbol was precisely angled in relation to the north-south movement of the satellite so that the figure would appear to stand completely upright on the image obtained.

"Any hostility that some environmentalists have shown toward space projects arises from the intense sense of responsibility to focus on the needs of the planet. They have not come to appreciate - and hardly anyone has - that the long-term health of this world requires that we also develop the capacity to leave it in large numbers. So this is our dual responsibility to the planet that gave us our existence: to protect her and to spread her seeds. It is actually very simple and obvious if you think about it. Both activities are equally essential to maintain the balance of life. Now that we are mature, we must begin to take these responsibilities very seriously."
 
Steven Wolfe