In his 1988 essay The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History Donald Worster stated that environmental history is the interaction between human cultures and the environment in the past.
I will refer and work both with archaeological objects, out of a remote past, and environmental objects, dated back in the last century. The presentation of these objects will run parallel to the history of photography and the development of cinematic devices.
It is possible to find still photography trying to capture the night sky from the 1840s, and documentary motion pictures from the early 1900s. Later, there are examples of footage in different formats, from 16 and 35 mm and digital recordings.
A further theoretical question concerns reasons: Surveying the night sky is a powerful method in understanding the landscape of our universe. But why should we keep records of our night sky? By records, astronomers are most of the time referring to archival “images” of parts of the sky. Perhaps someone later on would like to use those archival images in an analysis, to report something that has changed from one image to another (usually the position and brightness of the object).
"The most beautiful fact about the cosmos is that things are constantly changing with time. New supernovae, stars that have periodic behavior in brightness, asteroids, and all sorts of exotic explosions that are enhancing the universe."
(Notes from my conversation with Roberto Morbidelli - INAF - Scientific Advisor - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino).
Archival images are best used when we want to have a reference of some source and to know how bright it once was and where it was locate in the Cosmos. Finally, archival images of the nights are like maps. Knowing the position, the brightness, and general classification of celestial objects is extremely useful.
Until the 1840s, humans have observed the firmament, and specifically the night sky with the naked eye and with telescopes, without being able to document what they saw on an external mean. What their eyes saw, their notes and sketches were the memory of the observations done. A photosensitive element able to substitute the human retina was introduced with the dawn of photography. Many instruments were conceived before of course to help the human eye when observing the celestial vault. Substantially they were all conceived to make measurements of the observed position, which is a purpose they still have nowadays. What has changed is that we have some intermediaries, with their own, independent "memories": first of all plates for photography. A telescope was an early adjuvant but was not recording any data. Photographs did.
"It is a breakthrough in astronomy - as the technique creates a revolution in the approach to observing the sky. It is not only a technical break, it is rather one in method. A final result to transmit, convey or preserve after an observation, has always been existing"
(Notes from my conversation with Roberto Morbidelli - INAF - Scientific Advisor - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino).
The representation of the night is to be found in various forms of expression: from petroglyphs dated to the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary (roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago), or drawings on papyri, metal plates from the Bronze Era, like the Nebra Sky Disc (1800–1600 BC), possibly featuring the oldest concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena known from anywhere in the world, until the appearing of instruments that amplify and therefore modify the perception of the sky, shifting the vision from the vault in its complex to evidencing a multiplicity of forms and phenomena connected to them, not accessible to the human eye, discovered thanks to the use of the telescope.
With photography humans could go one step further being able to memorize something on a support reproducing it in its presumed authenticity and extracting it from its non-repeatability.
Applied to the arts this method was firstly analysed in Walter Benjamin's Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), from 1935.
I have asked multiple advisors and scientific collaborators in Observatories why it is so difficult to find real-time moving images of the night sky and darkness. Apart from the fact that I was told that astronomers are more interested in long term observations of parts of the sky and / or filming instant phenomena, which also requires an exceptionally sensitive machinery able to record in the very moment something happening in the past light years away, it was Caroline Liefke, who gave me insight.
She is Deputy Managing Scientist at the Haus der Astronomie in Heidelberg, Germany.
"It's not that astronomers prefer to do long-term observations, for several astronomical phenomena it would actually be great to have real-time movies. However, we have to take long single exposures (sometimes for hours!) because almost everything in the night sky is very faint, so movies - which after all always consist of a sequence of exposures with short exposure times - simply do not make sense because there is nothing to see on the individual frames when the exposure times are too short. It is only with the advent of the digital age that cameras became sensitive enough to record anything but the Sun, Moon and maybe planets as a real-time movie. This is why you will likely not find much historical video material that shows anything but artificial lights during the night"
Moreover, any art form has an artist that has represented and described the night / darkness, from frescoes and paintings, to literature and essays with descriptions of the skies in Annales and other forms of expression, poetry and epos, short stories and novels.
From a posthumanist perspective, every living creature has a memory of darkness and a relation to the night skies, which will not be part of this exposition, even though this perspective belongs to my intended artistic practice for the overarching multimedia project Darkness Matters is a part of: Too Loud and Too Bright.
Albeit I have stated that most of the findings come from the 1800s, this curated journey starts 10.000 years ago.
After having visited the room dedicated to “my” ar(t)chaelogical past, I will now leave you to enter the rooms of this virtual space dedicated to darkness and meet some of its inhabitants.
In the next page you will find a ground floor plan of the rooms.
