Perspectives on Earth

a text by Hernán Ulm

"A Deep Sky: Ultradistances and Microscopies" brings together works by Argentine photographers Federico Winer and Gerardo "Tito" Páez, showcasing different ways of constructing images of Earth. Rather than presenting images that represent a familiar form of this well-explored planet, what we are shown here are maps and dreamlike constellations made of hallucinated shapes and colors. From Federico Winer's satellite perspective to Gerardo Páez's microscopic gaze, what appears as visible in the work of these two artists is presented with a clarity full of ambiguities: What Earth is this? Which Earth are these images looking at? What we see is always laden with ambiguities because vision is likely the most ambiguous way to access the world. The gaze always seems ready to be deceived, susceptible to falling into illusion, and poised to be amazed. And what we see is never exactly what is presented to us, perhaps because every gaze is truly (against the naivety of the eyes) the result of complex operations, the consequence of a process in which images are an effect that questions the eye that looks at them. Much more, those that unleash the fury of their extraordinary colors; because these images by Winer and Páez were not, in the first place, produced to be seen by the eyes.

If, on Winer's side, the images are mere information produced by machines to create identity marks on the Earth's surface, on Páez's side, they are minimal expressions of an inaccessible world reserved for laboratory study. Thus, Earth is no longer one, nor always the same, but is revealed (after all, these are photographs, and in them, something is always revealed) in this multiplicity of dreams and hallucinations that construct as many different lands as the many perspectives from which it is seen. Because Earth, this planet where we are accustomed to living, can open up to as many forms as the gazes we cast upon it, and between Winer and Páez, at least two types of gaze are taking shape. One gaze - Winer's - is cast upon the Earth from the Ultradistance that satellites produce on the atmospheric edge of life, where everything becomes unbreathable, and human vision gives way to an airless gaze, but also without ground to tread. Winer's images are those that can be seen by an eye that denies the earth as the support of weight, images that deny the bodily weight of vision. A gaze constructed with algorithms that we are incapable of producing ourselves; a gaze as abstract as it is sinister, as there is something familiar but also absolutely strange in it, something that tells us that this is the Earth we inhabit, yes, but it can also be something else. Faced with this dreamlike evidence, Federico Winer applies a new twist to the images to produce a second estrangement that no longer targets our vision but the technical gaze with which satellites produce illuminated bit-mapped cartographies. These images that satellites cannot look at, images that are also sinister for the extra-atmospheric eye that produces them: perhaps, images that are the inverted dreams of sleeping satellites."

One gaze - that of Páez - approaches the observed objects in such a way that it brings forth hidden worlds in them, only possible because in that microscope intimacy, they are liberated. They configure maps laden with an impregnable enigma, with extravagant colors and shapes that, despite our insistence on looking at them repeatedly, always deny their category of mere stones. In "Lithos," Gerardo Tito Páez creates the exuberant intimacy of what refuses to be seen. This proximity doesn't belong to the apparatus but to the light that, through it, illuminates the mineral enigmas of the depths and reveals an inverted sky. This inverted sky is also the mineral dream that only emerges when daylight arrives. In the depth of their mystery, minerals reveal their dreamlike life, traversed by light that steals away the forms and colors they are oblivious to. They reveal themselves as possessors of a life that requires uncertain proximity to be brought into the visibility of our astonished eyes.

Between Winer's Ultradistance and Páez's Lithos, we are shown the many worlds we inhabit, as if within our planet there are countless, infinite planets, and countless, infinite lives that only art, with its magics and spells, could bring to light, as if only art could illuminate what hides from the obvious gaze on which our vision rests.

Thus, on one hand, the microscope reveals, with its extreme proximity, the presence of landscapes constructed in a play of more or less arbitrary light, discovering worlds and figures that only excessive closeness can make visible. On the other hand, the Ultradistance shows on the Earth's surface the forms of landscapes that elude the eye situated on the planet's surface. We thus move from the most hidden to the most visible, and from the most visible to the most hidden, through series of images that overthrow the coordinates of the human. There is an inverted sky, doubly inverted sky falling onto the earth, and the depths of the planet emerge into the light of the celestial. The profound is found not within the earth but on its exterior. And the distant is no longer far but in the imminence of closeness: from its birth, photography has been a systematic questioning of the spatiality in which the human resides.

Between Winer's Ultradistance and Páez's Lithos, what is at stake is the power of the immeasurable; this is what does not have a human metric to capture it and makes the eye always deprived of the distance in which it habitually constructs the visible. Páez constructs his images with a proximity that exceeds millimeters; Winer, with a distance that is beyond kilometers. Too close is Páez's microscope, too far is Winer's satellite; what we ultimately see is the excess of a desire to see that, in its excess, produces images that are close to the monsters dreamed in our nightmares. But also monsters dreamed in the nightmares of technical images. Is this not a possible definition of art, a way of overthrowing the normality of what we see when we are cast into the everyday? The possibility of opening the world to other worlds, of opening the gaze to new ways of seeing? Between Winer and Páez, we go from what is hidden beneath the earth's surface to what is shown as extraterrestrial evidence, from the micro to the macro, and we find at the edges of these extremes surprising similarities that never cease to amaze us: the mineral forms seen through Páez's microscope show secret resemblances to the aerial forms of Winer's satellites, almost confusing us. The mineral becomes a sidereal experience, and the satellite reveals the secrets of an aerial surface. But perhaps this similarity comes from that initial position - the gaze's position - in which each work composes its images outside of a "human" perspective. Therefore, these images are also a map that reveals the vital condition of an Earth that our eye does not know how to look at. A cartography of the Earth beyond the human who looks at it. A prefigured constellation torn and cornered in its forms of production. Winer works for a technical eye that, in turn, has been intervened, interrupted. A thorough investigation into pixels, altering colors, highlighting some figures, erasing others. Páez increases or decreases light and proximity, forcing the mineral to reveal flashes that he then captures with his camera attached to the apparatus. Perhaps that's why, in both Páez and Winer, there are no figurative forms of the human, and their landscapes could well be from uninhabited planets - the world as an android might dream it, the nightmare of a machine.

In the darkness of the Earth, as if hidden from every human gaze, there exists a universe of colors and forms that barely becomes visible to the microscopic lens, capturing what deviates from the ordinary gaze. On the Earth's surface, the landscape reveals itself in the proliferation of figures visible from the precise Ultradistance where the camera unveils the colors detailing the world.

At the highest reaches of the atmosphere, where the Earth ceases to be our home, the satellite gazes produce prehistoric figures, fossil remains that the Ultradistance of an eye, no longer ours, generates as part of the illusions of a gaze situated outside our planetary border.

On one hand, Gerardo Páez and the microscopic gaze bring to light what would otherwise remain hidden in the depths of an invisible abyss. On the other hand, Federico Winer's Ultradistance vision, vertical, undermines the identity of places and constructs others, in that space that no longer belongs to any human, that no human eye can see. In these perspectives around the Earth, perspectives around the gaze, photography reveals a world that the ordinary eye cannot behold. The deep sky revealed in that place where the Earth hides from gazes is the sky hidden this side or that side of the celestial sphere covering our planet. Ultimately, the proposal of "Un cielo profundo: Ultradistancias y microscopías" aims to liberate a different gaze on what seems most obvious and everyday: the forms of the planet we inhabit. Because highlighting those forms that remain invisible is also a different way of inhabiting it. An immoderate way of looking. An immoderate way of dreaming what we see.

The Sky that Watches Us: Federico Winer's Ultradistance

Perhaps there is no just distance to see what is happening to us in the incessant vertigo of moments falling upon us from above. At every moment, satellites produce images in their sustained drift over the imaginary orbits of the Earth, and at the same time, taking a position becomes impossible in a space saturated with overlapping, erasing, and continually forgetting images.

Perhaps the only way we can finally see, perhaps the only way to configure a situated gaze, the only way to access a gaze that positions itself amidst the realm of images, is to break the immoderate forms of what is seen and build a distance that cannot be measured according to the coordinates of an eye. Make the gaze itself a vertical instance that falls, itself, onto space and time. No longer a distance but an Ultradistance, as if saying an ultra-human only possible for an ultra-human experience. An Ultradistance that, at the same time, positions itself within technical means and extracts from the algorithmic eye a vision that no program can calculate. Like a celestial nomad, Federico Winer, in a silent apartment in the City of Buenos Aires, wanders the surface of satellite images to find in them what escapes normal vision. To extract from the calculations of satellites the image that no program can produce. Art, after all, as Gilles Deleuze said, consists in producing visions and hearings that cannot be perceived by the usual means of perception. Ultradistance does not work with the algorithms of machines. These algorithms are merely the technical materiality of a calculation space, and it is from them that Winer extracts what they cannot produce. Ultradistance is the artistic materiality that emerges from calculations and predictabilities. Ultradistance ultimately produces that displacement within these programmable means and takes its place in the midst of these means to produce that uncertain vision, that uncertainty (the horror of programs is the uncertain).

Viewed from above, from a vertical perspective - literally falling from the sky, or to be more precise, falling from beyond the skies, like a power that exceeds the forces of the planetary - the Earth's surface is displayed with extraordinary forms. Where we see a common figure, the satellite gaze intervened by the photographer revives atavistic landscapes, legendary animals, prehistoric figures, constructing a territory that upsets the orientations of the certain. A cartography that does not seek to organize things but play at the limit where the visible organizes into figures. But also an affective map that questions the geographies with which politics has distributed the territory. A cartography that reveals a distance that cannot be filled by human gaze. A distance that no longer belongs to the space where the human resides. A gaze devoid of all pretense of technical precision.

Under the effect of meticulous subtraction, the series of 'black images' reduces the visible to a minimum of light. Under this subtraction (which involves meticulous work on pixels), this group of images highlights the artificial nature of any gaze, isolating the figures that it makes appear outside of all context. As if they were suddenly floating in the night that dreams them. As mentioned before, something of the dreamlike nightmares of the technical world presents itself in Federico Winer's works, a diurnal remainder of the night, a dark impulse amid the day. Or, on the contrary, the force of its light increases due to the presence of a kind of white ocean that seems to overflow the limits of the images we see: a kind of battle between colors and their sum (white as the sum that annuls differences), a tension that subjects the images to the expression of their contradictions. What we see is always the result of conflict.

The satellite must also struggle against its gaze to show the images we look at. The satellite also sees in light an ally it is always ready to betray. Seeing too much, as we know, is a form of seeing nothing. And art puts this limit in tension where the excess of light becomes blindness.

Finally, those images in which the privilege of color triumphs over the impulses of night and light. There, a joyful explosion realizes the celebration of a hallucinated vision. Color planes cut across each other and form an uncertain thickness that the reality of the image denies. Because if Federico Winer's work shows the nightmarish side of the dream world of satellite technology, it also shows the hallucinated limit in which the illusion of finding a place absent from the human is always at risk (it's the strangeness of these landscapes: they don't seem to be inhabited by anyone). Hallucination that prevents the satellite from recognizing (or subjects the satellite to a new effort to recognize the place it is dealing with). And Ultradistance is, in this sense, also the removal of the places from which the image has been torn, and the persistence in naming the places in the titles of the photographs may be, perhaps, a kind of Winer's joke for us to understand - more than we don't see what he shows us, that what he shows us does not correspond to the name indicated, and that the entire politics of the gaze inscribes itself in the tension between the name and the place; or even more so, that places are nothing but an excess of names that, with a slight turn given to the program, cease to exist in the artistic Ultradistance of satellite photography. An Ultradistance that does not belong to the way distance exists for humans but to the most sophisticated technologies of the digital world, ultimately revealing the artificial nature of the Earth and showing that what we see can be seen differently.

The Revelation of Stones: Gerardo Páez's Lithos

Viewed from a proximity that exceeds the eye, the Earth reveals the gleams hidden from our gaze. Páez's images, captured through the microscope, unveil a sky experienced in darkness, accessible through an enigma that must be unraveled. This enigma invites us to traverse the photograph: images captured in the intimacy of geological work that ignites the colors and forms of a sky not often observed.

The sky is concealed within the Earth. Páez's photography releases this sky, concealed by the Earth's surface, to the eye. In the silence of his laboratory, Gerardo plays with lights in myriad ways to extract a brilliance that dazzles from the opacity of minerals. Resembling strange planets or diffuse stars, Páez's images appear as distant oceans of an unbearable light, repeating patterns of a geometry that enchants the gaze. Minerals transform into torrents of images, flows of lights and colors exposed to the eye with the fleeting brilliance of a transient truth. Observing these photographs, the impact lies in how they impose a different regime of visibility. How and from where should these images extracted from stones be viewed? Beneath the circular appearance that seems to imitate the eye's form, the artificial form is revealed through which, via mineral polarization, shapes and colors are liberated that, otherwise, exist in tension between the microscope, polarized light, and the mineral reserved in the Earth's darkness. A significant part of the secret of these images is the patient exploration with which Páez extracts visions from the deepest realms of this buried sky.

Once again, as in Winer's case, here, it is a technical effort that makes the dormant dream of stones visible. And, as in Winer's Ultradistance, this is once again a questioning of the notion of space, a new questioning of the medium and processes through which an image becomes visible to our human gaze, perhaps too human. Where are these images? Where are they truly produced? Are they the secret dream of stones in their mineral rest? Are they the result of a cosmic power that, through the microscope, exhibits itself in the distant stillness residing in the depths? What, ultimately, are we observing? It is a question of space because, in the minimum that is presented to us, there is also the minimum distance with which the microscopic apparatus cancels the common organizations of our body's space. No human body can inhabit this intimacy of light. No human eye can venture into this mineral closeness. Blind to the light that turned into stone, the technical God restores for us the gaze that was intended to be denied.

Now, mutant worlds that science cannot classify become visible. Lithos is not, in this sense, a sophisticated catalog of minerals housed within an unknown universe. It is rather the limit indicating the failure of any cataloging endeavor. Like in Winer's case, here too, technical data sheets create disorientation regarding what we see. It is the image of art going beyond technical imagery. As in Ultradistance, in Lithos, names fail, and specifications are useless remnants of a science that can no longer classify what we see. We see blue, gold, white, black; we see abstract figures or figures that seem to represent some more or less known face. But there is no Latin nomenclature that can speak the truth of what we see. Because, quite simply, under Páez's incessant play, the microscope does not reside in the measured space of truth; it does not establish a relationship with the true. Geology reveals itself as art because the ends of its means are perverted (as was the case with satellites in Winer). What Lithos shows us is a threshold where the stone nullifies itself in its image. The moment when the mineral frees itself to its own sky, and we see the remains of an image denying its origin. A threshold where the image deviates and frees the gaze for a drift that, from frame to frame, abandons the pretension to restore a precise meaning and leaves behind the trace of a path where the visible is ultimately the result of a fortuitous exercise.

Since its birth in 1839, photography unfolds a new world for a gaze that no longer knows what it should see. Because photographic capture (the photographic language is a language made of captures) first corners and then transforms space: there is no photography except at the cost of breaking the spatial coordinates in which the human was housed. In other words, there is no photography except as a transfiguration of the space that the human inhabited to produce a new space. Micro and macroscopic. Quickly, in the 19th century, the discipline experimented with these transformations: the sky and stars were photographed, planets and their moons, and also skins, eyes; bodies fragmented into their minimal visibilities, exposing to light a tiny world that our gaze was incapable of seeing. This incapacity was not only revealed by photography (perhaps the most strident photographic revelation was the limits of our body) but also surpassed by it (surpassed: this is, not only surpassed but also displaced by a series of prescriptions that reorganized all modes of seeing).

In any case, the world was no longer the object of patient contemplation but the result of an operation that produced the visible according to precise instructions that were quickly assumed as certain.

Since then, we have had to relearn to see. The truth of the visible would be a truth of the apparatus. And, above all, this truth, the space that hosts our gaze, the space that inhabits our body, is no longer the one that found in the eyes (or better, in the eye) the axis that organized the dispersion of the visible. This new space requires new modes of organization that are not part of the eye but refer to the process, the technical calculation that makes it possible. Can machines dream? Philip K. Dick asked in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the science fiction novel that Ridley Scott would transform into Blade Runner. Is there something like an unconscious of machines? If so, this dream could well be a technical nightmare: that the image is unrecognizable to the apparatus that produces it. As every dreamer has experienced, in dreaming, we are inhabited by forces we ignore. The most intense nightmares are those in which a small deviation transforms the familiar into the monstrous by forces that transfigure the visible and make it operate according to other economies.

If technical images dream, it is not unreasonable to attribute to them the possibility of nightmares, that their technical procedures produce something they themselves ignore, that in the microscopic infra-space, remains of visible forms, lights, and colors emerge unexpectedly, which technical daylight rejects. That in the microscope, there is the beginning of a mutant life that makes visible, from the deepest depths of the Earth, the existence of a world that cannot be cataloged, or that, in satellite ultra-distance, prehistoric monsters suddenly appear, eschatological figures, forms preceding humanity. It is in this dreamlike space of machines that "Un cielo profundo" seeks to propose an exploration of technical nightmares to restore them a place within humanity, that is what Winer and Páez do with their art, making machines begin to dream.

Hernán Ulm holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is a professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salta and the National University of the Arts, and a visiting professor at universities in Argentina and around the world. He has produced and curated