conVerge - Image and Meaning

Image and Meaning - David Malin

Download the accompanying Power Point presentation, (11.3 Mb).

This talk is about objectivity and subjectivity in art and science, and I'm going to use as an example something from the history of astronomy.

Before photography was invented, astronomers had to make drawings of the faint things they saw through their telescopes in order to have any kind of record. This was essentially the work of translating on to paper something that nobody had ever seen before and which has no terrestrial counterpart. The complication is that astronomical objects are seen only with difficulty, and only when the eye has adapted to the dark, a process that takes many minutes.

I show here two images of the Orion nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. While it is bright enough to be seen without a telescope, with one it shows a wealth of detail. Fig X was made by John Herschel in the 1830's while Fig Y by William Parsons, Earl of Rosse in the 1860's.

Both Parsons and Herschel saw this astronomical object quite differently. Fig Z shows the same object through a big telescope and while they didn't see the colour evident here, the fact remains that it is 160-170 years since the drawings were made. Parsons and Herschel took months to make these drawings - this picture was captured by the Anglo Australian Telescope with a five minute exposure.

It's instructive to compare the drawings with the real thing. As you can see, Herschel managed to capture the real subtleties associated with the nebular, especially in the lower part of the picture. And if you superimpose the two images you find the stars match their positions exactly. Herschel used the stars as a grid to map out his drawing.

Rosse made his drawing in much the same way, with the stars positions. His drawing also captures much of the detail but significantly it's different detail. Parsons saw a different kind of detail than Herschel, even though they were looking at the same thing, both of them with the declared aim of making a completely 'scientific' or objective drawing.

I suspect Artists' minds work in much the same way ?it's part of the way we see. They look at a scene and it appears in their minds in a way that is different for each individual. And the process of translation of that scene into a finished work of Art is also individual and quite distinctive, from person to person. I like this scientific example however, because the image was not made as an artistic expression, rather it was made as a scientific record. These early astronomers were trying to understand what was happening out there in space and they were making drawings for future generations of Astronomers to come along and compare their drawings with new observations. The intention was to note any change in the nebula.

Nowadays we can take photographs of these beautiful objects. Fig A is the wider view of the Orion Nebula which is taken with the Anglo Australian Telescope. These pictures are made by taking three separate, black and white exposures on large glass plates through filters to capture the red, green and blue components of the spectrum. They're combined later in the lab to produce true-colour picture.

From a technical standpoint, these are the colours you would see if your eye was sensitive enough to faint light and you had access to a large telescope. The original black and white photographs are scientific data when we get them and visually are particularly unpromising. From a formless blob on the untreated image due to extended exposure times, the process known as "unsharp masking" allows a much more detailed three colour image to be achieved.

There are beautiful areas of tranquillity, one of them outlined in the square. Again in black and white you see a lot of this strange structure which is very difficult to interpret. It looks interesting, but so what? But if you see it in colour it has a true meaning. The colours can be interpreted in terms of distance of the components of this nebula and you can derive distance and three dimensional information in understanding the nature of the colours you see in a picture of this kind.

Fig B shows the Horse Head Nebula in the same patch of sky. And again it can be improved by making the image with an unsharp mask to give you an image that is quite strong, and it's also quite well known. Again colours that you see here are absolutely real as they would be in real life. With a larger telescope you can see more detail in the Horse Head Nebula, but even with the largest telescope, this distinctive outline is too faint to be visible to the eye.

As part of the Adelaide Festival 2002, I'm involved in creating a video to accompany the premier of Ross Edwards' 4th Symphony, 'Star Chant'. 'Star Chant' is a choral composition, where the chants themselves are the names of stars and constellations. The Western names are actually Arabic and Greek and the Aboriginal names reflect the mystery of the groups of stars as seen under the brilliant Australian sky.

The Australian Aborigines see this group of stars (that we know as the Pleiades) as a campfire - a group of stars around which people are sitting. It is in the northern sky it is described as the Women's Camp appears because it is seem as a small cluster of stars. The much brighter and nearby Hyades stars are the men's camp. They have the bigger campfire and the brighter stars. But in western culture these stars have these lovely Greek names, Merope, Maia, Electra and so on. So although there is science in interpreting the colours we see they are also a beautiful group of stars and it's important to acknowledge the ancient legends that surround them.

That is what 'Star Chants' is intending to do.

Let me end this part by showing you some more images of the kind astronomers use to make this kind of determination and examination, pictures that also have some aesthetic merit. These are simple records of nearby galaxies, each one like the Milky Way, showing their amazing complexity and variety,.

You need a telescope to make pictures like this, but you can also easily make quite simple images of astronomical things closer to home around this by popping a camera up at night and just letting the Earth move beneath your feet. As it moves you can capture the trails of the stars as they wander by. These are the trails of stars passing over Siding Spring in northern New South Wales where I do this work. I've just marked out the position of the star trails of Orion arising above the western horizon. The stars are coloured. You can reveal their colours by opening the camera shutter and just changing the focus in several steps as the stars drift across the sky. Not a difficult thing to do at all. And these are the stars of the Southern Cross treated in that way.

Many people, especially David Miller from South Australia, specialise in this kind of photography. The Australian foreground, the twilight, the rising of the stars. They make beautiful, inspirational images using natural elements. There's nothing artificial here. This is one of my own pictures of the Moon setting over Sliding Spring Mountain. Of course, as the Moon sets so does the Sun, and here is a trail of the setting sun, all images produced using the movement of natural (if rather distant) objects. So here is a way of using a scientific approach producing images that I think are interesting and enjoyable and which are, I hope, a nice compliment to Ross Edwards' symphony.

So if you can run the video now please. This video runs for thirty minutes or so. It's made completely of large digital files and it takes us from the celestial equator right through the constellations, all the way to the South Celestial Pole. I made this using large still image files and an intensive course of Adobe after effects. The idea is not to dominate the music. It is simply as a backdrop to the sound which has to be the key element of this symphony of course. It's quite a difficult trick to make images that are interesting but not dominant because normally when we go to the cinema, images are there up front and the music and all the rest is in a way secondary. I had to reverse that. So this is all gentle and slow, there's no violent movement here. But it has to retain its visually interest for nearly thirty minutes, which is quite a challenge. Anyway, it's an example of a scientist using images in an artistic context. Thanks.