Splat

The other night, i attended an opening of an art installation by UK photographer Graeme Miller. This show, BEHELD, consists of 10 fish eye images projected onto convex glass plates. When a plate is lifted from its pedestal, a released button triggers a soundscape unique to the environment where the photo was taken. Interesting concept, very artiste-like. To see a couple of the images, scroll down here. All the photos were taken at places where airplane stowaways have fallen from the sky, with the camera lens looking up at the void through which they fell. You can read a short interview with Miller here, in which he discusses the origins of the concept. As i said, there are only 10 images, so if you’re in Obuda and have a free half hour, check them out.

Being more of a morbid existentialist than an art critic, what i found compelling about the work was not so much the medium, artistic quality, etc. – things which i’ve no qualified perspective on – but the inspiration for it. A Swiss housewife is washing the dinner dishes, looks out the window and sees a body moving at gravitational momentum land in her flowerbed. Splat! When she runs outside and looks up, there is only the two-dimensional plane creeping across the sky, whereas the body now at her feet made rather indiscrete three-dimensional use of the same space. i’m not sure this is the kind of mental referencing the photographer wanted to lead us to, but there it is.

The show did get me thinking about stowaways, questioning why someone would risk hiding on the exterior of an aircraft that was going to be flying at 10,000 meters. Ok, it’s a rare occurrence because obviously most people wouldn’t take this risk. According to a US Dept of Transportation study done in 1996, the NY Times documents only 10 such cases between 1947-93. In keeping with the non-emotive, objective mandates of science, this particular study used the plane stowaway phenomenon to look at the physiology of survival. Evidently the body enters a hibernation state from which it can later recover full functionality. This obviously punches a huge hole into my idea of eradicating Dick Cheney by tying him to a wing of the space shuttle, but so be it. While it appears that hiding in the wheel carriage of a plane is a common choice, some stowaways are a bit less self-annihilistic and opt for interiors.

The majority of stowaways, now and for centuries past, have famously been found on ships. The International Convention relating to Stowaways was signed in 1957 as part of international maritime law, and stories like this one about Chinese immigrants who incredibly spent 32 days (!) in a shipping container abound if you search the topic. Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun has forever fixed in my own imagination how horrific this experience must be. That so many people continue to do it by choice kind of boggles the mind, but maybe, like the 3 guys in Kanafani’s story, they just believe what their carrier tells them and assume nothing could be worse than the lives they’re leaving behind.

The newest topic in stowaway concerns are extremophiles. These are bacteria that can survive extremely hot or cold conditions, such as methane-ingesting chemeosynthetic bacteria found at the sea bottom and inside volcanic matter. NASA has been cataloguing these species in order to later be able to distinguish earth-inhabiting bacteria from any they might collect unknowingly from Mars – celestial stowaways, you might say. In this case, what enters the imagination is more of a vomitous kind of splat, the micro alien thing that drove Sigourney Weaver to head-shaving extremes. I remember reading about how after Mount St. Helens exploded in 1980, they found these extremophiles in all the waters surrounding the volcano, then related them taxonomically to archeabacteria drudged up from the bottom of the ocean around deep sea hot springs (obviously connected to volcanic activity) and, if my memory serves me correctly, so-named because they are thought to be the oldest living creatures on earth - geologic stowaways or evolutionary castaways?

The ultimate irony would be if space experiments on these bacteria evolved into human testing down the road, in the form of injecting a person’s body with extremophile DNA, stuffing them in an airplane wheel casing and seeing what happens on a flight from Moscow to Rio. What goes around comes around? i’ll leave that one to Mr. Asimov to work out, and photographers of the future who can figure out a way to turn it all into art.