The Art and Science of Space Media

When James Oberg wrote in the txchnologist blog that astronauts have difficulty in seeing the Earth from space during their first flights, and require some time to develop “Space Sight”, he touched on a seldom mentioned but centrally important aspect of the entire space endeavor.

This seldom mentioned aspect is the cognitive impact on the astronauts of seeing the Earth and space directly and, perhaps more importantly, how that seeing, when transmitted to the Earth-bound population through astronaut words and pictures, has affected the entire world.  This larger aspect of seeing space is known in the space community as the “Overview Effect”.

From the beginning of space flight, astronauts and cosmonauts have consistently reported just how unusual the sight of the Earth hanging in an infinite space of billions of stars really is.  Their personal descriptions, outside the bare accounts of their mission, have often been peculiar and counter-intuitive.  My first post in this series quoted a wide range of such accounts.

Despite being highly educated, often in Earth and space sciences, they report being emotionally (if not intellectually) surprised to see that the atmosphere is “paper-thin” and that the biosphere is so visually rich and interactive that it seems like a living being, (giving rise to the increasingly accepted scientific model of the “Gaia Hypothesis”).

Even the fact that the Earth is round and just “hanging in space” and that the stars are not just “overhead” but hemispherically around us is now deeply intuited, not just known intellectually.  In short, they directly perceive the reality of the Earth as a planet.

These and many other sensations are so new and so strange that they report many of their previous perspectives and understandings of life on Earth, even their own lives, are changed in powerful and positive ways.  As Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ long-time physician and surgeon said: “No one who went into space wasn’t changed by the experience.”

Again, perhaps even more significantly, many astronauts have said that it is their belief that anyone who goes into space will be similarly affected, and that when large numbers of citizens and leaders finally go, it will have a profound effect on our world, our culture and our future. 

Given this “profound effect” vetted by so many astronauts, why is the Overview Effect so little known or understood?  What makes it so hard to communicate?

 Why is the Overview Effect so Little Known?

A New Space Age is now aborning; a new, commercially enhanced age of space travel that promises to carry tens of thousands of private citizens (and hopefully leaders) as well as whole aspects of our culture into space.  One would think that this potentially transformative aspect of the Overview Effect would be an important idea in this New Space Age.

Curiously, few outside the space community are even aware that the Overview Effect exists, and even many space leaders and advocates radically misunderstand it and are often reluctant to talk publically about it.  Astronauts have frequently said that their experiences are difficult to communicate, even using the best space images they return with. 

As Apollo 11 astronaut James Collins succinctly put it, “Those who saw pictures of the Earth and then thought ‘Oh, I’ve seen everything those astronauts have seen were kidding themselves…an image alone was a pseudo-sight that denies the reality of the matter.”

Certainly if space travel has such powerful, positive and transformative effects on the space traveler, and potentially on the culture to which it is transmitted, the next question is why have all our space media and astronaut accounts not communicated a more powerful understanding, let alone awareness, of the Overview Effect to us? 

This is where the field of Media Theory enters the equation.  As we’ll see, understanding the nature of media, and in this specific case, SPACE media, both its limitations and potential, is as important as the nature of perception itself to a full understanding of the Overview Effect.  First let me briefly review the role of perception itself in the space experience.

 The Cognitive Science of Perception

In my previous post I outlined how the most recent advances in the Cognitive (brain/mind) sciences, with its new model of perception helps us to see how and why the space experience is so unexpected and affecting.  These new perception models explain that we see in a radically different manner than most of us think, or were taught in school. 

This new model of perception highlights the degree to which our brain “constructs” the scenes that we just seem to “see” by simply looking out through our eyes.  Indeed, it emphasizes that the light that enters our eyes does not have enough information to transmit the perceptions that we have.  Our brain takes this limited information and “constructs” the images we “see” based on previous perceptions and information.  This new model is frequently described as “the Brain’s Best Guess” as to what the world looks like.

According to Dr. Dale Purves, head of the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, “I don’t believe there is a reputable cognitive scientist in the world today that thinks we are simply and directly “seeing” the physical world.”  His authoritative textbook, “Why We See What We Do,” and his award-winning website www.purveslab.net, documents his research.

 Media Theory: The Nature and Limitations of Media Images

Modern media theory, aligned with these same new cognitive perception models, explains that even high-resolution photos and video have far less information than we imagine.  Such “realistic” images are considered by cognitive/media researchers to be like a “visual language” that people in media saturated cultures like our own learn to interpret at such a young age that we are unaware of making the “translation” from the abstract nature of images into the seemingly “lifelike” representations of the physical world we take them for.

People from cultures without highly a developed representational art, people born blind who regain their sight later in life through an operation and very young infants, do not experience even “realistic” photographs as representing the physical world to the degree that the “visually experienced” do.  Visual experience with media images allows us to infer depth, 3D shape and other qualities obviously lacking in a flat image.

Because of our extensive life-long experience of comparing our multi-sensory perceptions of the world with the media representations, we make the translation so naturally we are unaware we are doing so, much like the way we hear our native language as immediately communicating ideas and images despite the complex learning process that young children or those learning second languages must go through.

Media theorists such as Marshal McLuhan and others have told us for decades that media images are shaping our internal models of the world in powerful ways that we are only vaguely aware of.  This “paradigm-creating” effect of media and the forms of media we habitually use was what McLuhan meant by his iconic statement “The Medium is the Message,” That is, the very forms of our media structures the way we see so strongly, that in many ways it has at least as powerful effects on our minds as the “messages” they transmit.

 Cognitive/Media Limitations and The Overview Effect

What these new models of vision and media tell us about the Overview Effect is that when the astronauts see the Earth and Space directly for the first time (after having only seen inherently limited media images), they experience a sudden “information overload.”  Their brains struggle to make sense of what they’re seeing as their media-created internal models of the Earth and space are restructured by the sudden new information.

In this struggle, which many have described as an “overload of sensation,” their internal models and understanding of many different aspects of the Earth and space (previously created out of only limited media images), are shifted in many and sometimes life changing ways.  This is the heart of the Overview Effect.

So the seemingly obvious feeling that we have “seen” the Earth and space because we have seen the media images the astronauts, space probes, and telescopes have provided to us, is not supported by the astronauts themselves.  Certainly space media lacks such overloads. The astronauts then, are our only true “subject matter experts”.  Everyone else is just guessing!

The astronauts, who were exposed to the best Earth and space media that NASA could provide, still had powerful and largely unexpected experiences of shifted perceptions and perspectives from their direct sensory experience.  As Don Lind said in The Overview Effect; “Intellectually, I knew what to expect.  I have probably looked at as many pictures [of the Earth] from space as anybody…But there is no way you can be prepared for the emotional impact.”

More sophisticated and immersive media forms, such as IMAX 3D, provide a more realistic experience, but still don’t “make the leap” to the Overview Effect.  John Grunsfeld, one of the astronauts on the last Hubble repair mission, attended the Premier in Raleigh North Carolina, of the IMAX movie “Hubble 3D” that documented the mission.  He agreed that the large screen 3D presentation was obviously highly effective in bringing the drama and reality of the astronauts floating around the giant space telescope into the theatre, and the Hubble’s pictures of the universe were breathtaking and even awe inspiring.

Yet when I asked Grunsfeld about the Overview Effect, and how much of the experience of seeing the Earth hanging in a star-filled universe came through the movie, he succinctly replied, “Not much.”  If the giant IMAX 3D is limited in its ability to communicate space, then imagine what you are getting on your T.V., computer, tablet; let alone your I-Phone(!)

This is certainly not to minimize the sense of wonder, grandeur, and incredible scale of the Universe that Hubble pictures and other space media have brought to our world, which is also an aspect of the Overview Effect.  But there has been something of a disconnect between the images of the universe and the images of the Earth in that universe.  From the astronauts’ descriptions, it is this combined vision that is the essence of the Overview Effect experience.

 The Second Limitation of Space Media – The Intent of the Director

Thus limitations in the image capture and projection systems account for a major part of this disconnect.  But there is a second factor that separates conventional Space Media images from the astronaut’s true perception.  This is the Intent of the producer/director.

The vast majority of Space Media has obviously been taken by NASA.  Quite naturally, their primary intent is to document their program.  This means a focus on the space craft, Earth, Moon and the astronauts at work and leisure.

Their intent has not been to capture the astronauts’ personal experiences.  This is not a criticism of NASA.  The mission is their focus and the astronauts are the people who carry out the mission.  A real estate developer, who documents the construction of his buildings, seldom interviews his workers on their personal experiences of the project.

However, for the public, especially in this new age of public space travel, the nature of the experience will have greater meaning than the development and use of the technology.

The astronauts have consistently mentioned specific elements of the space scene that have been powerful triggers for their shifted perspectives.  The incredible thinness of the atmosphere, the obvious “life-like” interactivity of the biosphere, the visceral feeling of the “roundness” of the Earth and the hemispherical surround of the stars are frequently mentioned examples.  With the possible exception of the thin atmosphere, few of these “come through” or even show in the majority of conventional NASA footage.

And while space movie and other visual art creators have wider latitude in their works, they are still working from the NASA originals.  And the astronauts more descriptive “Overview Effect” accounts are little known to the public.  So, creative space media still frequently omits many of the visual “triggers” of the actual experience itself.  The very fact that the four decade old 2001: A Space Odyssey is still remarked for its uniquely powerful evocation of the space experience, is evidence that such space media is rare.

 Third Limitation of  Space Media – Understanding the Experience

From the beginning of the Space Program, astronauts have been rumored to have had “spiritual” or “metaphysical” experiences or epiphanies.  While there are a number of interesting reports of such transcendental experiences (among the most interesting are by Edgar Mitchell and James Irwin).

A second explanation of the space experience is “Space Euphoria”, a term which dates to early NASA scientists who realized that some sort of sensory experience was sometimes distracting astronauts from their tasks and was likened to “Rapture of the Deep, which sometimes affects SCUBA divers.

Unfortunately, for many folks, these rare and unusual experiences have come to be conflated with the Overview Effect.  While clearly not descriptive of the mass of astronaut experiences or their range of perspective changes, they have tended to keep the majority of space leaders and advocates from speaking about the Overview Effect in public.  Given the fact that the New Space field is working hard to achieve credibility in the eyes of Congress, Wall Street and the public this reticence is perhaps understandable.  Clarifying the nature of the experience and its scientific support will allow the Overview Effect to take it rightful place in the New Space Age.

 Conclusion

The Overview Effect of space travel is a subtle and difficult to communicate internal, perceptual experience.  The Two Keys to overcoming this barrier are  1) The use of more sophisticated, realistic and immersive media technology and  2) An artistic approach to capture and creation that listens to and embeds the astronauts’ own observations into the images rather than working only from previous images and imagination without astronaut input.

While both the technology, tools and astronaut accounts are currently available there is presently little awareness of the dramatic disconnect between the experience of existing space media and the experiences described by the astronauts.  Hence, there is little demand for, or the drive to create, such media experiences. 

Bringing these little known or understood space experiences and disconnects to wider public and space community attention is the first step and the primary goal of The Overview Blog.