Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.21.1804061659310.20850@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Untoward, Unruly, and Peculiar Galaxies
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2018 17:02:13 -0400 (EDT)
Untoward, Unruly, and Peculiar Galaxies From: An Isophotometric and Photographic Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies,Bruce Carlton Schanberg, University of Chicago Press, The American Astronomical Society, The Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Number 230, Vol. 26, Pp. 115-230, Nov. 1973 http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies0.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies4.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies5.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies6.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies7.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies8.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/galaxies9.jpg The 91 examples can be correlated with their NGC number; for example, #3, Atlas # 3553 #2, p. 129, is correlated with NGC A0826 (galaxies6.jpg). The 1973 images are superceded with updated online imaging of course. For the foreseeable future, images will always be updated, closer to an unnerving truth - that of an incomprehensible universe or multiverse, unbelievable greater in extent than we can comprehend or directly explore; the universe is not another Mars or Oort cloud. What fascinates me is the complexity of the techniques used in 1973 as well as the rough scan-line contouring; the images 'look like' body contusions and represent, for me, the kind of mapping I've described as tending towards blankspace - filling in the lines ("filling out the form"), suturing the sparse information - by inference drawing out structure. But then there's also the question of the supplement itself, the reproductions, the finely surfaced pages, the choice of printing technologies, the grey values mapping... And on the other and absent hand (the signified here is never at hand), the issue of the inconceivable distances represented by these choices, distances that tend towards the dreams of warp- speed and wormholes, easy ways to evade the obdurate space-time magnitude of the universe - impossible to do, possible to conceive of only by the simulacrum of inference, as hearth or home or chora. To conceive of such is to conceive of earth deterred, a form of differance. And these cinematic animations of travel among the stars and galaxies? fabrications, chimera implying illusory and unachievable mastery beyond the one planet (and its immediate neighbors) we're already leaving in ruins. In the meantime we have the 'truth' of these already ancient photo- graphs, revealing the distance between image and object and the distance between the page's referent, our hubris, the everything else nowhere near. ...