Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2011)

In the winter of 2014, the Millennium Scientific Initiative Nucleus on Protoplanetary Disks and the Anilla Cultural Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, organized an interdisciplinary initiative—Art, Astronomy, Technology and Society (AATS)—that sought to engage the general public in the sciences through creative projects and collaborations.¹ The project launched a creative incubator to develop small-scale creative projects in collaboration with local astronomers and held an Astronomy Day consisting of a series of lectures and workshops that connected the driving questions of astronomical investigation to contemporary artistic production. The initiative culminated with an exciting exhibition that married data visualization and contemporary art installation. The collaboration yielded new media visualizations of different celestial phenomena in mixed media that made the cosmic sensuously graspable. Whether a manipulable computer program of exoplanetary formation or a fiberoptic light sculpture programmed to the captured sound waves of radio telescopes, the artistic practices on display attempted to reduce scale, convert dates, and emplace the artist-spectator, suggesting that to comprehend the cosmic one must first apprehend the microcosmic. Astronomy as visual culture foregrounds how comprehension necessitates apprehension and opens onto a series of questions about the forensic value of images and the political and epistemological stakes of their use in memory debates in postdictatorship Chile. I explore these questions by turning to Patricio Guzmán’s 2011 Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light) in order to articulate astronomy to both history and cinema and to suggest a different framework for thinking the image within the historiographical practices in the region.

The opening AATS lecture series yielded a dialogue between astrophysicists and artists in which the former attempted to make the abstract concrete and the latter attempted to make the concrete abstract.² The installation work by Marcelo Arce, Astronomical Unit, overlaid sound wave patterns recorded by radio telescopes to shift the hues illuminated in an amorphous fiberoptic mass.³ The installation’s suggestive title is borrowed from astronomy, defined by Arce’s astrophysicist interlocutor Hector Canovas as a unit of length roughly the distance from Earth to the sun. In his remarks, Canovas establishes two scalar factors: the astronomical unit as a unit of distance and the cosmic epoch as a unit of time. The astronomical unit is a metric for astronomical measurements, originally defined through telemetric readings of photon reflections off celestial objects.⁴ More important for our purposes, the astronomical unit is a scalar factor for astronomical imaging. Canovas’s images all bear a linear scale. The only means to make the image legible is to provide a scalar factor that systemizes the coordinates of the image, and the only way to make the image intelligible is to use terrestrial intervals as a reference. And yet, the astronomical unit still exceeds our grasp, so Canovas provides yet another scalar conversion, both spatial and temporal. He first explains that the distance from Earth to the moon can be scaled to the distance from Valparaiso to Viña del Mar, the distance from Earth to the Sun to the distance from Valparaiso to Quito, and finally the distance from Earth to another planet to over twenty thousand circumnavigations of the world. The cosmic epoch functions as a unit of time determined by the relative intensities of photons received. Canovas again reduces this temporal scale through reference to our terrestrial clock time: light travels mere seconds in the first case, four days in the second case, and over one million years in the final trajectory. He makes the human body and its units of length and time the yardstick through which to make these epochs comprehensible.

Arce’s installation was part of the final exhibition, which was conceived and curated under the signposts of totality, myth, concealment, and discovery in order to “interpellate the spectator.”⁵ These four terms not only were guiding lights for the artists in collaboration but also open onto a series of questions that motivate scientific investigation and artistic production (and arguably historical research) in the region. Concealment and discovery suppose an Enlightenment epistemological framework...