BOMB 111/Spring 2010
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
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From Earth, Mars is a planet of photographs. Artists will find art in these images, and scientists science—certain truths will be revealed to each. It is a place that can only be explored by viewing oddly unfolding pictures—whether NASA’s, Hollywood’s, or those unexpectedly encountered in BOMB.
NASA has been particularly busy on Mars lately—making many pictures and naming landmarks. With no one on Mars to disagree, and no patrons to commemorate, explorers of Mars are mostly free to name rocks as they like. And this is how it should be, I think.
Not long ago, a rock-covered ridge (adjacent to McCool Hill in the McMurdo Panorama) was photographed for the first time and named by a NASA science group. Among many rocks visible in the photos, four were given names—Orcadas, Juan Carlos, Castilla, and Primero—after locations in Antarctica.
In these drawings based on NASA rover photos, I have given Low Ridge a different name: Himmelskibet Hill, after the Danish “sky ship” which first traveled to Mars in 1917. I also have named numerous rocks left unnamed by NASA for the first time here. Besides, I have supplied the four NASA-named rocks with supplemental aliases because sometimes confusion can help reveal chaotic truths hidden beneath order by making us look more closely at what we take for granted. All the new names I propose refer to films that tell stories about Mars—these names remind us that sci-fi cinema has explored the potential significance of this place already in pictures that are historical, endlessly present, and of the future.
In 1982, Jack Goldstein said that “art should be a trailer for the future.” Since then, several famous futures have come and gone but what he said remains chaotically true. Art is not timeless but, rather, may be recurrently renewed, like the future. This project is dedicated to that memorable idea. —David Clarkson
In this video by David Clarkson a squadron of red ants explores a NASA Mars landscape photograph as a chronology of Martian cinema counts down.
Click here to watch a larger version of this video
Pick up a copy of Issue 107 to see Clarkson’s Bomb specific drawings.