"The Pastel from Mars"
Tuesday, March 17th, 4:45 PM
AD White House, Guerlac Room
Abstract
In July of 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft made a historic flyby of Mars, capturing the first photographs ever sent back to Earth from another planet. The image data was transmitted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena at an agonizingly slow pace, trickling out as a series of numbers on long strips of paper. The engineers at JPL didn’t want to wait for hours for the computer image to be processed, so they stapled the numerical strips to the wall, bought a box of pastels from a local art store, and rendered the image by hand, color-by-number style. It’s hard to believe that the first robotic image of an alien world came into being in pastel—a medium most closely associated with eighteenth-century French portraiture. But perhaps this eccentric pastel drawing can help us look differently at both the past and the future of space imaging.
Biography
Jennifer L. Roberts is the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She is an art historian and photographer whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences (especially astronomy), the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. She is the author of six books, including Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), and Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (2024). Her forthcoming book, co-authored with artist Dario Robleto, explores the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA’s Voyager Golden Record in 1977 and launched into interstellar space. She is also working on the first image transmitted from Mars, nineteenth-century glass-plate astronomical photographs, black hole imaging, and the Moon in the sculptural imagination.
