The Door to the Visible
The screenprint the door to the visible references the buttons distributed by Stewart Brand in his 1966 campaign demanding NASA release a photograph of the earth as a sphere in space. For Brand, being able to see the Earth in total would push humanity to see the planet as finite and vulnerable. In 1967, NASA released an image of the whole earth, which Brand would go on to use on the cover of his counterculture publication The Whole Earth Catalog. In this print, the only part of the paper left blank is a hole cut out of the center, mimicking the composition of the famed NASA photograph. In doing so, this work calls into question the utopian promise of technological progress, particularly within Silicon Valley in which Brand ended up playing a prominent role. Nearly 80 years later, we have the technological means to document the entirety of our planet and no shortage of images, yet our promised utopia falls short.