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Orbs, blobs, and glows: astronauts, UFOs, and photography
Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Jane D. Marsching
In our time, bewildering leaps in science and wildly improbable technological inventions feed a hunger for anything and everything beyond daily routines. In 1995 CNN reported that hundreds of viewers called in to say they were seeing Jesus in a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Eagle Nebula (M16) that shows stars forming inside a six-trillion-mile-long plume of gas seven thousand light years from Earth. This is the single most iconic Hubble image, the one that we think of when anyone refers to the Hubble. Its candy colors and ethereal columns are eerie and transcendent. It is both mysterious and organic, a lot like some of the outer-space scenes in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001. Above all, it is completely unfamiliar. Unlike the astronauts' images of UFOs, which are filled with earthly referents and are comfortingly taken by flesh-and-bone men, the Hubble images are beyond our ken. Only in an unimaginable future would we ever travel to the Eagle Nebula; this gaseous cloud is not a form, like our Earth, that we can relate to. In the absence of the familiar, we make things up. Even NASA's Hubble press release begins with a litany of familiar images: "Undersea coral? Enchanted castles? Space serpents?" (13)
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Psychological research offers a scientific term for our desire to see something in nothing, to harness reality for our fantasies. "Pareidolia" is a type of illusion or misperception involving the capacity of people to see, with blind certainty, patterns in unstructured data. Examples of pareidolia range from the paranormal, like the image of Jesus in the Hubble Eagle Nebula or visions of Mary in a foggy window; to vernacular and mythical constructions such as nephelococcygia, the science of looking at clouds and seeing shapes. Fourteen men and women, nine birds, two insects, nineteen land animals, ten water creatures, two centaurs, one head of hair, a serpent, a dragon, a flying horse, a river and twenty-nine inanimate objects are represented in the night sky. One of the great lovers of uncertainty, philosopher David Hume, noted that it may be impossible for us to really know anything in the world around us, since what we experience is filtered through our notoriously unreliable senses. We all know this from the various optical illusion experiments we played as kids (is it a bunny or an old lady?)--but we always forget. Perception is an active process. We take spotty data and follow our desires through a chain of analogy to our end goal, along the way overlooking, shoving aside, or simply forgetting information and conclusions. (14)
Seeing is one of the most suspect of our perceptual apparatuses. Studies of the saccadic movements of the human eye demonstrate that our eyes don't see a unified field, but instead leap frenetically from detail to detail in order to construct a whole. The processing of the perceptual data of the image depends to a great extent on the viewer's intentions. Further, the saccades--the jumps the eye makes--are stored and perhaps used later for data recall. (15) So seeing is believing or, rather, seeing is constructed belief. It's a slippery slope. On the one hand, our seeing is incomplete, and, on the other, our brains pick and choose from what data they do finally receive. Seeing triggers a reaction in the cerebral cortex, allowing us to recognize and process the visual field--at the same time, the rhizomelike structure of the brain means that many other chemical reactions cascade through the brain as a result of this first seeing, leaving us with countless impressions unprocessed, disordered, unknown. Looking itself precedes by nanoseconds the convoluted analogic mazes our minds construct. In the midst of all this confusion, it's a miracle that we ever had a modernist illusion or that we hope for a world tidily organized by the universal, teleological, and objective. Similarly, anxieties over our fragmented, localized, subjective postmodern condition seem silly, since we are finding more and more that this has always been the basis of our human condition.
