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Photography and the subatomic world collide in a new documentary
First it was Andy Warhol's obsolete digital archives and then the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Now, the Hillman Photography Initiative's documentary team has set its sights on the CERN physics laboratory in its newest film, Subatomic. Famously known for housing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this facility is also home to the AEgIS experiment and the ATLAS Detector, one of the world's largest digital cameras. The scientists there use a variety of photographic technologies, from a cutting-edge 100-megapixel sensor that captures 600 million pictures per second, to antimatter experiments that use traditional photo emulsion to track particles. CERN even has an artist in residence program, showcasing outsider perspectives on the scientific world. These are all captured in this fifth and final installment of The Invisible Photograph film series from the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) and Hillman Photography Initiative, which seek to reveal the hidden aspects of images whether obscured, lost or forgotten. Subatomic: The European Organizaton for Nuclear Research debuts online today, and you can watch the latest film below or stream the entire series on CMOA's website.
Pittsburgh's Gulf Tower is turning into an Instagram mood ring
For years, people in Pittsburgh have been able to get weather forecasts, holiday displays and occasional sports updates by glancing at the illuminated peak of the city's Gulf Tower building. There will be a change in programming, though, on February 11-13th, when the "Weather Beacon" will be replaced by a virtual mood ring to gauge the positive or negative nature of regional Instagram comments. The museum cooked up the Gulf Tower Project to coincide with artist Antoine Catala's upcoming "Distant Feel" exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It highlights the ways images can provoke emotional responses, even if they're just a Valencia-filtered photo of a cat in a box.
McMoon's and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
If you've ever used Street View on Google Maps to preview an unfamiliar travel destination, then you'll understand the reasoning behind NASA's Lunar Orbiter missions during the late '60s. The space probes were doing reconnaissance and beamed back 160 pairs of images covering a total of 12,000 square miles of lunar landscape. Unfortunately, the technology at the time resulted in less-than-ideal photographic quality. In 2008, however, a group called the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) was able to track down the original tapes and restore them to their full resolution. The LOIRP set up shop in an abandoned McDonald's -- which they dubbed McMoon's -- near the NASA Ames Research Park in California and began wrangling archived tape reels and defunct machinery to help them achieve their goal. The story was documented for the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) and released this week as Extraterrestrial: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. It's the third installment of CMOA's The Invisible Photograph series, which deals with imagery that's been lost, degraded or almost destroyed.
