Eyes as Oars
Book
Of all the senses, sight is the most dominated by impatience
“Eyes as Oars. A Visual journey to Mars” is a book about exploration and planet Mars.
With the advent of magic lanterns in the 17th century, images have shown their powerful kinetic potential: the viewer can, without moving, journey around the world, dizzyingly accelerate, suddenly stop.
None of us has ever been to Mars but NASA images allow us to explore it with our eyes, rekindling that early experience: our sight as a tool for exploration.
Such photos, along with other Public Domain or authorized images, compose here an imaginary visual journey to Mars, inviting the viewer to become an explorer, using his eyes as oars, moving between real and symbolic images linked to the planet’s observation and our popular imagination, to man’s relationship with outer space or to the fantasy of unknown creatures.
The images subconsciously connect people’s diverse internal aesthetics and representations of the mystery to the very real exploration of the universe by space agencies.
Driven by personal suggestions, and without any ambition of exhaustiveness, the book appears as a kaleidoscope of images, photos, charts and illustrations, at first glance disorienting like all places we visit for the first time.
The viewer’s effort is rewarded at the end of the book, where extensive captions and credits of the images are gathered, as an invitation to explore further our scientific and cultural heritage through the chaotic and fascinating World Wide Web.
The work in its complex is also a project about the Web as a place to explore, as a field of exploration and a land for personal paths; a place in which to retrieve images and breathe new life into them through associations and new sets of meanings.
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12x17 cm - 127 pp.
Edition of 500 copies
Danilo Montanari Editore
2019