Artsnova Digital Art and Space

NASA Lunar Base

A 1949 Gallup poll of Americans found that only 15% of the public believed that man would walk on the Moon by 2000. How is it that we accomplished this by 1969? Of course the Cold War and a series of Soviet space firsts played the lead role. But space art also played a role in providing for the population a visualization of what space exploration could be like.

Space art still has a role to play in exposing the public to the vision of what it would mean to truly become a spacefaring civilization. There is a precedent for art’s ability to shape public policy. One of my favorite artists is Thomas Moran, an outstanding painter of the Hudson River School. One of Moran’s landscape subjects was Yellowstone, which he visited as part of an expedition in 1871. His paintings of the landscape had such an impact on the public that in 1872 Yellowstone was made our nation’s first national park. If you would like to know more about Thomas Moran and his art, I recommend the book Thomas Moran.

Peter A. Nisbet, a well known landscape artist who was part of the NASA Art Program, said that “Art is about what words cannot express. Many things have happened in the exploration of space that people cannot know through photographs or newspapers/television reporting. It is the artist’s task to bring forth the mysterious, the exalted, the great beauty and power surrounding these events.”

Later this month I will be attending the International Space Development Conference in Washington D.C. While it has not yet been confirmed, I expect to be giving a presentation on space art and its power to promote space exploration. Titled Using Art to Promote Space Exploration, the presentation is part history, part call to action. To be considered for a programming slot, I had to submit a 500 word abstract. Imagine my surprise when upon finishing the abstract I discovered that I was over 1,000 words. Heavy handed editing got me down to the 500 world limit. Following is the abstract that I submitted.

Title: Using Art to Promote Space Exploration
Author: Jim Plaxco
Abstract:

In the beginning there was astronomical art whose purpose was to illustrate planetary bodies and astronomical concepts. With the advent of science fiction space art came into being as a means of illustrating fictional space ships and off-Earth habitations.

In the 1950’s space art migrated from the realm of science fiction to science when artists were commissioned to create illustrations for non-fiction books describing space exploration. A peak of public relations was reached during this period with a series of articles in Collier’s Magazine which became the basis for a subsequent series of programs created by Disney for television.

In 1962 NASA created the NASA Art Program to document and celebrate the events and activities of the space program. This and other art commissioned by NASA has been used for multiple purposes including: technical illustration of hardware; public affairs imagery promoting particular programs; capturing the emotional impact of space exploration; illustrating scientific discoveries.

Throughout the space age art has been used as a means of visualizing and promoting space exploration. The target of this art has been both the public and public policy decision makers. This art focused on the Apollo program during the 1960’s; the Shuttle program during the 1970’s; the International Space Station during the 1980’s and 1990’s; and the Vision for Space Exploration during the 2000’s. Today the main customers for professional non-fictional space art are space agencies, aerospace companies, and those publications that cover the field.

Recent years has seen the addition of marketing the images returned by various robotic missions as art. The initial such project was “Mars As Art” which used Mars Odyssey THEMIS data. Subsequently “The Sun As Art“, “Landsat: Earth As Art” and “Our Earth As Art” programs were launched. These programs raise public interest in space exploration. This is best exhibited by the extensive media and public attention that images from the Hubble Space Telescope have garnered.

In addition to commissioning art to illustrate its programs, NASA has also sponsored art contests targeting students. The positive relationship between space exploration and student interest in science is a long accepted one. By sponsoring these contests, NASA is spurring student interest in science, art, and space exploration, as well as heightening awareness of their own programs.

NASA has leveraged art to satisfy multiple objectives. The space activist community should take advantage of these lessons. NSS has embarked on a program of support for the space arts. In addition to the traditional venue of commissioning art for Ad Astra, recent years have seen space art programming and shows at the ISDCs. Additionally NSS has conducted two successful Space Settlement Art Contests. NSS leveraged the art submitted to these contests by building corresponding art galleries on the NSS web site and using the winning art to publish calendars promoting space settlement.

As chair of the NSS Web Oversight Committee, I plan to advocate for the creation of a Student Space Art Gallery to spur student interest in art and space exploration.

Moon Base Illustration

The art used to illustrate this post is of an advanced lunar base and was used as an illustration in the 1992 multivolume NASA publication Space Resources. The entire publication is available as a PDF download from the NSS Space Resources Library.

Ad Astra, Jim

Earthrise Over the Moon

Yesterday I finished up my part in the judging of entries in the NASA Life and Work on the Moon student art contest. The theme of the contest was portrayals of people living and working on the Moon. There were some interesting submissions to the contest. There were a few submissions that ignored the fact that this was an “art” contest and instead submitted presentations, pamphlets, etc. While these were outside the bounds of the contest, it was a pleasure to read through these and learn about what these persons considered to be the benefits of humans living on the Moon. For more contest details, visit the NASA art contest site The Moon: Back to the Future.

We judges were to grade the artist’s submissions based on four different criteria: artist statement; artistic elements; creativity; validity. Scoring was 20 points for the artist statement, 30 points for artistic elements, 30 points for creativity, and 20 points for validity.

Artist Statement

The artist statement was a written explanation of the submitteed art. Unfortunately some artists failed to provide a statement. I’m not sure why someone would spend a substantial amount of time creating an artwork to submit to the contest and then not take the comparatively small amount of time to explain the nature of their submission. The artist statements spanned a wide gamut from simple explanations of the image to complex explanations of the artist’s thinking and planning process.

Artistic Elements

Judging the artistic elements involved evaluating the artist’s use of line, shape, color, texture, etc. For me this represented the most difficult component to judge because such components are highly dependent on the observer’s values.

Creativity

Being creative while adhering to the contest’s rules for validity can be a challenge. One of the more creative submissions was an art deco style advertisement for tangtini - a drink composed of Tang and vodka. Unfortunately the connection between the piece and theme of living and working on the Moon was rather tenuous.

Validity

As the theme of the contest was living and working on the Moon, the submitted artwork was expected to be realistic in its depiction of the nature of the lunar environment and what living there would be like. Artists had to balance being creative while staying within the bounds of reality. Judging the validity of some submitted art was challenging in this category. For example, there was a very nicely done terraformed moon. But just how valid is that? Unfortunately that piece did not depict any human presence on the Moon.

I must say I enjoyed the experience of being a judge in the contest. The last contest I had an opportunity to judge was the NSS Space Settlement Art Contest which ended in January. Every artist should take a crack at being a judge in an art contest. It is one thing to look at a picture and say “Oh I like that” and quite another thing to analyze the picture’s composition and artistic elements with the goal of assigning a grade to the picture. The process can be very instructive.

About Earthrise Over the Moon

I created Earthrise Over Moon to illustrate this blog entry. As a source I used one of the HDTV images from the JAXA Selene (aka Kaguya) mission to the Moon. I then brought the picture into Adobe Photoshop and used the “Find Edges” filter to create an outline map of the areas of contrast change in the source image. I then used several custom brushes of my own creation to digitally paint the picture. For my Photoshop brushes, I used custom brush tip shapes and activated the Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, and Color Dynamics options. These brush controls were set to be sensitive to pen pressure as I was using a Wacom stylus to paint the picture.

Ad Astra, Jim

A person who shall remain nameless talking to noted science fiction author Ben Bova about global warming on Mars.

I recently completed the construction of a photo gallery for the National Space Society. The 2007 International Space Development Conference Photo Gallery gallery features 148 photographs of the people and events of the 2007 ISDC which took place May 25-28 in Dallas TX.

This gallery came into being as a consequence of a suggestion that I made: that having a gallery of photographs of the 2007 ISDC would be a good way of promoting the 2008 ISDC. I was subsequentially given a DVD of photographs taken at the conference by Nancy Ostertag - the photographer contracted for the job. Sifting through these photographs I came up with 148 to use in creating the gallery.

Looking back over the gallery I find that there are a few especially noteworthy photographs. In particular:

• Best Smile Award goes to Cassie Kloberdanz.
• Best Award Presentation Style goes to NSS Senior Vice President Mark Hopkins who gets down on his knees to present former Apollo Astronaut and U.S. Senator Jack Schmitt with the Gerard K. O’Neil Memorial Award.
• Best Speaker Photograph Award goes to the photograph of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin because of its excellent lighting.

While the gallery has been up since last week, it has not yet been publicly announced so for you Artsnova readers, you’ve got a scoop. And if you want to find out who that nameless person in the above photograph is, you’ll just have to search through the 2007 International Space Development Conference Photo Gallery.

By way of full disclosure, I currently serve as the Chair of the NSS Web Oversight Committee and am also a candidate in the upcoming NSS Board of Directors election - having been nominated both by the Nominations Committee and by petition.

Ad Astra, Jim

A Binary Mona Lisa

I recently came across an article about teaching computers to appreciate art - at least that was the title of the news story. The story actually dealt with a software program under development that would be able to analyze a work of art and associate it with an artist in its database. The software would also be used to spot art forgeries.

The program was created by Daniel Keren, a professor from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa in Israel. The software works by subdividing known paintings by an artist into discrete blocks. Each of these blocks is then mathematically reduced to a formula. The multiple formulas can then be combined and compared with one another. The underlying program logic is that these sets of formulas will uniquely describe the artist that created the associated works of art.

Models were created for five artists - Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt van Rijn, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Wassily Kandinsky - using 15 painting per artist. The program was then tested against another 15 paintings from each artist to see if the program could correctly associate a painting with an artist. The program was able to correctly associate a painting with its artist 86 percent of the time.

Over the course of the article it becomes clear that the program has a very long way to go in order for it to be considered truly functional. I am skeptical as to the program’s chances of ever surpassing, or even equalling the judgments of the art specialist. While this program could develop to the point where it becomes a more useful tool, I can not see it ever reaching a state of reliability such that it becomes the arbiter of authenticity. I am even more skeptical of the ability to apply the program’s technique to the analysis of digitally created art since digital brushwork does not have the same characteristics of traditional brushwork.

If you would like to know more about this program, see the article Teaching a Computer to Appreciate Art

Binary Mona Lisa

Since this post is about software “appreciating” art, I decided to create an image reflective of the subject. The image used to illustrate this blog entry is a digitally manipulated rendition of that most famous of paintings, the Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, painted by Leonardo da Vinci slightly more than 500 years ago. The woman in the portrait is said to be the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.

Ad Astra, Jim

Quantumscapes - The Art of Stephan Martiniere book cover

I was in the book store the other day and came across a copy of Stephan Martiniere’s book Quantumscapes: The Art of Stephan Martiniere. I was surprised to see that it was published in 2006 - surprised that its publication escaped my notice. Either that or has escaped my memory. Surprising since in November of 2006 I had the privilege of moderating a panel - Designing a Spaceship - at the Windycon Science Fiction Convention and Stephan was one of the panelists. It was standing room only for the panel due entirely, I’m sure, to Stephan’s presence. 2006 was the year Stephan won the Chesley Award (named for Chesley Bonestell) for best hardcover cover art - although the award wasn’t given until 2007. He has also won a number of other awards as well. Check out Stephan’s web site at www.martiniere.com.

If you’re not familiar with Stephan Martiniere’s art, his speciality is science fiction art. The cover art for Quantumscapes is a piece titled Variable Star which was used as the cover for the science fiction novel Variable Star by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson. Quantumscapes is divided into five chapters with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of Martiniere’s art.

Chapter 1 - Books

This is the chapter that shines. It consists of finished book covers which are truly original in concept and execution. Splendid art. Far and away the best chapter in the book.

Chapter 2 - Film and Commercial Work

This chapter consists entirely of alien character sketches and studies.

Chapter 3 - Games

Sketches of aliens dominate this chapter with some landscapes as well.

Chapter 4 - Personal

Composed of a small collection of alien life studies.

Chapter 5 - Process

This chapter takes the reader through the creative process using as an example the cover art Variable Star starting with rough sketches and finishing with the final artwork.

While Stephan’s aliens are original and very well done, it is his landscapes, cityscapes, and spacescapes that excite me and these are only really found in the book’s first chapter. If you are a fan of science fiction art, then you should check out Quantumscapes: The Art of Stephan Martiniere.

Ad Astra, Jim

Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Today I visited the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. I was there to see the Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print art exhibit.

Quoting from the Imaging by Numbers exhibition flyer:

“This groundbreaking exhibition examines the intersection of digital technology and the graphic arts by surveying the use of computers in printmaking and drawing. From electronic waveforms and plotter printer drawings to experiments with computer code and software and inventive combinations of digital and traditional printing techniques, Imaging by Numbers features approximately 60 works by nearly 40 artists… from the 1950’s to the present.”

There were works by Manfred Mohr, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Ben Laposky, Otto Beckmann, Michael Noll, Kamran Moojedi, C. E. B. Reas, and Richard Helmick to name a few. There were also two works by Joan Truckenbrod who taught the first computer graphics class at Northern Illinois University. I am happy to say that I was fortunate enough to get into that graduate level course. You can read more about this in my article Recollections of my Introduction to Computer Graphics.

Another smaller exhibit that is running concurrently is Space, Color, and Motion which features animated images and one very cool computer controlled magnetic ball creating patterns in a sandbox.

If you are in the Chicago area and art thinking of seeing the show, do it now because the exhibit ends April 6. Admission is free! The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art is located on the grounds of Northwestern University at 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL.

I found out about this art exhibit by way of the American Art American City Exhibit Calendar web site created by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The calendar consists of listings of current exhibitions in Chicago area art museums.

Here is a list of links you may find useful.

• Nine works from Imaging by Numbers
• Imaging by Numbers exhibit information
• Block Museum of Art Hours and location
• American Art American City Exhibit Calendar

Ad Astra, Jim

Photoshop FITS Liberator screen shot

A new version of the free ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator plugin for Photoshop was released earlier this month. This plugin makes it possible to open FITS files with Photoshop. For you Photoshop users who are not familiar with FITS, the Flexible Image Transport System is the standard file format for astronomical data, like that of the Hubble Space Telescope for example. For more FITS information visit my Making Astronomical Art with your PC Resources page which I created for students in the astronomical art class I taught at the Adler Planetarium.

According to the release notes, the following enhancements are in this new release:

1. Universal Binary for Mac allows native CS3 operation on Intel-based systems
2. Flip image checkbox allows image orientation to be selected on import
3. Stretch Root functions now operate antisymmetrically about x=0
4. Version 1.1 of the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard is fully supported. For more information see http://www.virtualastronomy.org
5. Improvements to importing coordinate metadata from the FITS header

I went to the version 2.2 download page and downloaded this new version. There is also a Photoshop action called Colour_composite.atn that can be downloaded. This action automates the production of color images from the individual RGB grayscale layers. I’ve never used their action preferring to use one I created myself. I installed the plugin without difficulty. On opening a FITS file (M27 for the curious among you) I observed that the main dialog for this new version was essentially the same with the only modifications being to the Stretch Function dialog (item 3 in the list above) and the addition of a Flip Image option (item 2 in the list above).

You can learn more about the plug-in, how to use, and even get some sample FITS files from the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator Home Page.

Ad Astra, Jim

The Apollo 11 mission patch

The Challenger Center is hosting a Student Art Contest in support of space tourist Richard Garriott’s upcoming space flight. Richard is best known as the creator of the massive multi-player online game Ultima. I’ve never met Richard but I have met his father Owen Garriott who first flew in space on a Skylab mission. Owen’s second and last trip into space was in 1983 on the Spacelab-1 mission.

We’ve come a long way since then because Richard Garriott will be going into space as a tourist. While Richard is not the first space tourist, he will be the first person to travel to space whose father also traveled to space. Set to depart October 12, 2008, Richard will have tourist class accommodations on the less than roomy Russian Soyuz. His final destination is the uxorious International Space Station Resort located in low Earth orbit. His one week vacation is said to cost around $30 million. It’s grand to be witness to the birth of a new industry - space tourism. I only wish that it had happened sooner. For a lower cost alternative trip to space, I recommend one of the suborbital flights to be offered by Virgin Galactic. For more information about the space flight of Richard Garriott, check out Richard Garriott’s Space Mission web site.

The Challenger Center’s involvement is that Garriott will be working with classes at the fifty Challenger Learning Centers around the world as a part of a “Garriott Science Challenge” program. Science related classes will be conducted as a part of the program before, during, and after Richard’s trip to ISS.

In conjunction with the “Garriott Science Challenge”, the Challenger Center is conducting a Student Art Contest. The objective of the contest is for students to submit designs for a space patch. The contest, which was announced March 8, has a deadline of April 18. For contest rules and to enter the contest, see Challenger Center Student Art Contest Rules and Submission Form. Designs already submitted can be viewed at Garriott Challenge Student Design Gallery. Note that at the time of this post, no entries have been submitted.

Ad Astra, Jim

The Doomed Diskettes

I recently undertook the Herculean task of going through all my diskettes, moving their contents onto my hard drive if worth keeping and then disposing of them. I had been pretty good about backing up data files and program installations to the extent that over the years I had accumulated in excess of 1800 diskettes. I haven’t actually used diskettes for several years now, all of which were created on old PCs. Going back through these diskettes was like going through a dust laden trunk from the attic. The worst part of going through all my diskettes was that the data transfer rate was agonizingly slow. You get used to the speed of CDs and USB memory sticks and then you pop in a diskette and drum your fingers as you wait.

This was not my first experience with migrating to a new media. Recall that 3.5 inch diskettes were preceded by 5.25 inch diskettes. Try today to find a disk drive able to read those! But that transition was very simple given that those diskettes (at least the ones I had) only held 720 kilobytes of data and I didn’t have very many of them. That was a piece of cake migration. This was different: 1800 diskettes able to hold 1.44 megabytes of data each. Not only did I have an order of magnitude difference in the number of diskettes but each diskette held twice as much information as their predecessors.

Amongst my old disks I did find quite a few surprises. The best gem was a diskette containing the source code and executable for the classic computer game Colossal Cave. I can remember playing this text-based adventure game in college - accessing the host system it was on over my 110 baud modem. If memory serves me correctly, this game was the original computer Adventure game.

Some of the other software I came across included:

• CorelDraw version 2 (1991)
• Windows 3.0 (1990)
• PhotoFinish 1.0 by WordStar (1991)

The oldest software I found was IBM DisplayWrite 4 dated 1986. DisplayWrite was IBM’s first word processing software for the PC and an abomination it was. Rather than use it at work, I went out and bought a copy of Samna’s Ami Pro which was later purchased by Lotus and became Word Pro. I also found a diskette of software and references to BBS’ (Bulletin Board System). BBS’ were computer systems that you would dial into with your modem - the only way to fly in those pre-Internet days. Most of the BBS’ I wanted to connect to were a long distance phone call away and this was back in the days when long distance calls weren’t cheap.

The oldest data files dated back to 1989 and consisted of tables of data on near Earth asteroids. I also found backup copies of all the issues of Spacewatch and PSF News from the time when I was the editor of those publications.

At the finish of the project, the stacks of diskettes to toss numbered in excess of 1,700. I kept about 70 diskettes containing software, system utilities, etc. and another 20 blank diskettes. I next went through the files I had copied to my hard drive more closely, deleting those I considered either unimportant or redundant. At the conclusion of my project, I had just over 180 megabytes worth of files. It’s remarkable to think that of the files contained on over 1,700 diskettes, I was able to write all those I kept to a single CD with room to spare.

It’s even more remarkable to consider the great strides that have been made in data storage. In the early 1980’s diskettes could hold only 100 kilobytes of data. Today I have a portable USB hard drive that fits in my pocket and holds 250 gigabytes of data. Measured in terms of my 3.5 inch 1.44 megabyte diskettes, that’s the equivalent of 177,777 diskettes! (See Math Note 1 below) Here is another analogy: if each of my 1.44 megabyte diskettes had been filled to capacity, then my entire collection could have been written to four CDs or just one DVD.

Just as work grows to fill the available time, so to do files grow to fill the available space. When I started working with graphics files some 20 years ago, the files were small enough so that a number of them could fit on a single diskette. Today the size of my graphics files has grown to the extent that some consume the bulk of a single CD. And liberal use of a digital camera means that I now have tens of gigabytes of RAW files to back up. Now we have music and videos as well. At present I have in excess of 20 gigabytes worth of MP3 files and I expect that number to continue to grow. And there is every reason to believe that this trend will continue.

What does this all mean? The continued evolution of data storage technology means that the medium we save our files on today will not be accessible in the future. Combine this with our ability to save files of ever larger size in ever larger quantities. The bottom line is the next migration from CDs and DVDs to their successor could be a real nightmare - a task too hard even for Hercules.

Happy Computing, Jim

Math Note 1: Okay so I have a portable USB hard drive that holds 250 gigabytes which works out to be equal to the storage capacity of 177,777 3.5 inch diskettes. The picture at the top of this post is of a pile of something over 1,700 diskettes. That pile measures about 30 inches long by 14 inches wide and 13 inches tall. So a 5,460 cubic inch volume of space can hold 1,700 diskettes. Assuming the same degree of packing, it would take 570,980 cubic inches of space to hold 177,777 diskettes. That’s 330 cubic feet or a space that is approximately 7 feet long by 7 feet wide by 7 feet tall!. Imagine all that squeezed into a space that fits in my pocket.

Abstract Experiment in Rotation

I’m back from a weekend of Capricon. Unfortunately I was only able to spend Saturday morning at the con as my wife had to work and my oldest son was home sick. The only presentation I attended was Bryan Palaszewski’s Moonbases: Not For The Weak Minded Pirate. The first half was mostly devoted to discussing the Apollo lunar program and the second half dealt with moon base designs.

Following Bryan’s program I headed off to the Art Show where the first person I saw was one of my favorite ladies of SF, Lori, who was running this year’s art show. I also ran into friend and space artist Tom Peters who had some art in the show. We only had a few minutes to talk before he and his wife had to head off. I took this, my one opportunity, to walk through the art show and look at the art on display. Much of the art was small pencil drawings. The most popular themes seemed to be cats and dragons. One of the ladies working the show told me that “ninety percent of science fiction fans love cats.” In fact the only art on which I observed bids had cats, dragons, or both as the subject. Unfortunately for me I don’t do either dragons or cats. Tom had some space exploration art in the show - the only such art I saw. It seems to me that over the years space ships and astronauts have been on the decline in the local SF art shows. The only two pieces of astronomical art were my own. The most impressive piece in the show was a very large recreation of primitive cave art. It was wonderfully done and I lingered over it far longer than any other piece in the show.

Sunday was a hectic day. I arrived early so that I could begin the process of packing up my art. Fortunately I was able to get into the show area (the doors didn’t officially open till 10:00am) and got my unsold art packed up.

Programming began at 10:00am and I was on for my presentation Imaging Mars which was illustrated with my own Mars images. A good portion of my presentation was actually a tutorial on how people could access the raw Mars mission data for themselves and create their own Martian artwork.

I ran my presentation right up to the hour mark and had to make a mad dash to get to my panel on Podcasting. This panel had very much of a tutorial feel to it in that I and my fellow panelists spent most of our time discussing the how-to aspects of podcasting.

Following the end of the podcasting panel, I had one hour in which to go through the art check out process, get my art into the car, and grab a quick bite of lunch before heading off for my last presentation.

The last hour of programming for Capricon began at 2:00pm and I was surprised to see a nice sized audience for my Space Solar Power for Earth presentation wherein I explain the concept of space solar power and how it benefits both humanity and the environment. Note that the best resource for papers and studies dealing with space solar power is the NSS Space Solar Power Library.

And with that I was out the door feeling that first tickle in my throat that told me that I was probably going to come down with the same bug that caused my son to miss three days of school. Well, better to be sick after a con than before.

Ad Astra, Jim