Breath and darkness: realism and representation in astronomical illustration and cinematographic special effects

Despite their inevitable lacunae and elisions, extant visual forms within Science Fiction constitute a mode of representation that allows us to understand humanity’s engagement with the cosmos as an Other to the normative or habitual conventions of representation found in that which, following Christian Davies, might be thought of as ‘small history’.
Drawing on both filmic tropes of human space flight and interplanetary travel since Klushantsev’s Road to the Stars (1957) as well as Apollo documentation, this paper examines and considers the concept of work both as historic act (Marx), and as something necessitated by conditions of solitude or isolation (Levinas). Reviewing representations found in films such as Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report (2014), the paper proposes representations of astronautical work as a foundational element of a possible ‘écriture cosmique’ in light of the problematics of the arche fossil described by Quentin Meillassoux.

A meeting report summarising the event and papers is available, see reference: Ian Crawford, Expanding worldviews: cosmic perspectives, Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 60, Issue 6, December 2019, Pages 6.36–6.40, https://doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/atz195