A lemmy community for scientific discussion of the Curiosity Rover and Mars Science Laboratory.
I would really like to see these images not in """""true color""""" but in different renditions chosen by artists that still convey the reality of the image but put it in different lights that challenge the viewer to not simply file the image from another fucking planet as another beige image from beige planet.
I don't mean this as a criticism, but the actual texture to these images is truly otherworldly, it is just hard to appreciate when presented with such a monotonous color palette.
Interesting.
I've been looking at rover images for so long now (20+ years without any significant interruption) that I don't even see "beige planet" anymore. It's been long enough that I find non-geologist perspectives like yours kinda refreshing. I hope you don't mind a couple of questions:
I'm showing this just so you can see the natural range of colors that get exposed once the ubiquitous red dust gets swept away. Still a lot of orangey-beige at first glance here, admittedly, but the tans, ruby reds and browns really pop in the full-res images.
Serious questions here. I'm always wondering how science people can convey this stuff better to the broader public. I like your idea about the artists, that's for sure.
I was trying to think how to answer this because it is such a nuanced question and I don't want to just resort to "it depends!".
I think I figured out how best to put how I feel about it though. It is like how I see fake fireplaces or fake christmas trees or fake flowers... I don't mind fake things because often times the real thing isn't sufficent, practical or remotely possible. The only things I don't like are things that try to disguise their fakeness by valuing above all else perfect mimcry of the real thing or things that are tiresomely "realistic" or "accomplished" past the point that it means anything.
What does it mean to look out the window of a spaceship? Does it matter the nature of that interface? Whether it is literally an analog barrier or some digitally sensed picture that is processed and fed back to you in a form your mind can better comprehend? Every time I fly the idea of looking out of the window of the plane is fascinating to me, but the experience is glarey, annoying, awkward and unfillfulling usually. I would much prefer if they stuck a nice video camera on the underside of the plane and let me switch to it on the video monitor on the seat in front of me, I would be much more likely to watch that than a movie.
What I am trying to say is that I grew up with video games, I have never really cared about the idea of "what is REAL and what is Digital/Fake/Simulated" vs "What experiences are meaningful to me and why?" (the answer is often things with pleasant organic feeling fidelity) so ok if we are looking at a planet with a more limited color palette... what does "True Color" even mean in that context? How would Martians design film like the way Fujifilm has specific film chemistries that portray the specific blues of Earth's skies well while making skin tones look nice in portraits? Would Martian photographers get into different types of purposefully narrowed color palettes of Sepia to beautifully capture the incredible patterns written into the surface of Mars? Would they try to expand the narrow color palette into ""False Colors""" that helped our non-adjusted Earth eyes see the latent dynamism invisible to our perception? What unexpected transformations of sensed images from the surface of mars to different color palettes contain beauty we haven't discovered yet?
This information on Fujifilms digital simulations of different analog Fujifilm film types is instructive to what I am talking about, what would be the equivalents of these film chemistries camera film experts would arrive at intuitively over an interative process if they spent all their time photographing on mars? I have read articles on film chemistries that were specifically designed to emulate how we perhaps remember the blue sky, not how we actually perceive it for that is the experience we desire in a photograph, this is the thorny nature of perception.
https://www.fujifilm-x.com/en-us/exposure-center/get-to-grips-with-film-simulation-modes/
These are questions that have to be answered in an uncountable number of ways to be answered at all, but to put it simply, my eyes get tired of the tones from the images I see from mars, not in the detail. There is always detail to the colors, but if you unfocus your eyes and just look at the general overall color (and more importantly dynamics of color changes at a broader scale, what in music production is called dynamic range and what compressors are used to limit) I think it is that specific palette that becomes tiresome to your eyes.... kind of like in music production how your ears can become fatigued by a specific genre's style of music production that emphasizes energetic high frequency content after awhile and your body will start naturally craving a musical style that is more mellow in that respect. I want that, for mars photos lol. Notice I am not saying I have decided I don't like the genre's style of music production, simply that a constant stream of it is... unbalanced in a way that becomes uncomfortable after awhile and that there may be a way to introduce more balance if the imbalance isn't actually intended as a core experience.
Edit ok one more stab about being even more specific. Something I find very grating about the culture I live in, is that people incessantly describe art as "narrative" and while I think all art is storytelling it is the singular narrative that I take issue with. I believe the most serious responsibility artists have to the society they live in is to identify the simple large narratives that are growing out of control and topple them. When an artist starts to see mars photos and think "oh that is a Mars photo" and pass it over without actually looking at it, the natural next question the artist thinks is "wait what is a "Mars photo"? you know what that annoys me for some reason I am going to go see if I can make normal looking photos of mars just for the hell of it". Artists will do this intuitively, it might not ever even reach the conscious part of their mind they are so reflexively intune with that particular genius, it is like a seagull adjusting perfectly to a great random blast of wind that catches everyone else off guard on the shoreline, yet the seagull without hesitation retains its pose in the air above.
The aversion artists have to letting the mundane hang lifeless is what I am talking about. It is the way simple easy lies get under the skin of artists and give them an allergic reaction that makes artists so vital and powerful.
Back in the day, someone used to do something like that with MSL images, but not seen any in ages, maybe someone here can take up the challenge :)
I'm as far from being an artist as you can get, but I like what you and supersquirrel are aiming at. As you know, I've been thinking about data visualization and presentation for these missions a fair bit recently. Personally, I find natural color images like this one from the curvilinear unit plenty spectacular and readable as is, but in general, a lot more work needs to be done to convey these missions to people.
If I've learned anything from supersquirrel's point, it's that we need to show multiple perspectives on the landscapes these rovers see. The missions have a natural tendency to do most of their imaging during the middle of the day, but that hazy dusty mid-day illumination is nothing like the sharp lighting that morning and evening shadows bring to the landscape. At the same time, I'm always worried about data/visual overload in these situations...
