New Work
“I take a scientific approach to photographic art making. Exploring my desire to make outer space more accessible both in matter and concept. I knew at a young age I was destined to travel above the Earth’s atmosphere, although space travel has yet to cross my path it is important I find other means to wander. Utilizing the tools of science and playful experimentation, I recontextualize common objects through the lens of a microscope and natural phenomenon. ”
![Look carefully at the image above. The little blue dot outlined in the square is the Earth captured in an image by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) on February 14, 1990.
Carl Sagan was one of the driving forces who pushed for the Voyager craft to take the shot, he gave the following quote on what he felt about about the image:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/0893cb3e08bd683bd311f8a038887888/tumblr_mgfs0rZ1JJ1qbhnpvo1_400.jpg)
False Infinity, 2012 by Julia R. Cuddy
http://jrcphotography.weebly.com/
hey hey hey, this is constructed out of liquids, dyes and glitter.
