NASA recently released the first real photos of a new system with seven planets, some of which may be similar to the earth, so there are indications that life could become viable in them. These photographs consist of a few pixels that Kepler telescope has been capturing for several months. The system is located around Trappist, an ultra-cold dwarf star, and it is 40 light-years far from Earth. The light rays captured by the telescope between December 2016 and March 2017, left Trappist 40 years ago.

 

We already know that images mean nothing by themselves, they need a dispositif to give them a meaning. The more "poor" the image is, the weaker its signs are, the more possibilities there are to fill it with meanings. Thus, in these few pixels and thanks to the enormous scientific dispositif that supports it, promising worlds are represented.

 

In this case, the representation of landscape - or of the world - not only depends on a certain social construction of the gaze, but it does not even require the presence of a reality prior the construction itself - as it also happens with the virtual landscapes in which we live everyday. Given that these realities are completely inscrutable, far from any possible experience, the effectiveness of their representations, the fact that they become understandable - or visible - requires only a convention or trust in the dispositifs that generate them.

 

"Each dispositif has its regime of light, the way light penetrates it, how it diffuses and propagates, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth or making disappear an object that does not exist without it." (Deleuze, Michel Foucault, philosopher)

 

Light from an ultra-cool neighbor is an edition that collects the photographs of this new planetary system published by NASA, along with some quotes from the web of NASA and the newspaper El País.

 

Along with this publication, there are a series of images and objects that work as simple tests about the physical construction of images, a kind of homemade 'protophotographs', in which time appears as a fundamental element. This series includes a reproduction of one of the photographs from Light from an ultra-cool neighbor, drawn with graphite on a template; a template drawn on glass, which has been used to generate prints by the direct insolation of the paper and a small personal collection of plant fossils.