A Question of Perspective
Andreas Beitin
“Those who know nothing but chemistry do not know
that very well, either,” the mathematician and physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg observed at the end
of the eighteenth century.3 The reverse of this aphorism would imply that only those involved in other
disciplines—such as the visual arts—are capable of brilliance in their own chosen subjects. Now science—for
our context, that means mainly the natural sciences—
and art have long forged an alliance whose intensity
has varied over the centuries. Long before the supreme
scientist-artist of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci,
painted his Madonnas and Annunciations while also designing highly sophisticated apparatuses and engineering and conducting scientific inquiries, Jean Mignot, a
French architect working in Milan, proclaimed in 1392:
“Scientia sine arte nihil est, ars sine scientia nihil est”—
“Science is nothing without art, art is nothing without
science.”4 Surely one of the most prominent pieces of
historic evidence for this claim is the “discovery” of
linear perspective by the Florentine all-round genius
Filippo Brunelleschi, who constructed a mathematically accurate perspectival depiction. As is well known, his
technique was immediately seized on by his friend the
painter Masaccio, who applied it for artistic purposes
in his fresco of the Holy Trinity in the church of Santa
Maria Novella in Florence.
The time around the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries is particularly rich in examples of such
synergetic conjunctions: artists who (at least on the formal level) employ the protocols of scientific procedure
and—partly under the gaze of the audience—present or
conduct biological, physical, or chemical experiments.
There are also quite a few artists with a background in
science. Science is thus applied to processes of discovery
in art, processes that (can) go far beyond the realm of the
purely aesthetic. It is clearly recognized that the “and”—
the synergetic linkage of science and art, art and technology, transdisciplinary work—is the special element that
opens our eyes to dimensions beyond purely aesthetic
categories and scientific dogma. This “and,” along with
the operation in and use of networks, can play a substantial part in the acquisition of new knowledge.
Michael Najjar is a typical “and” artist, one who exemplifies this linkage of art and science, art and technology, art and vision. A seasoned photographer and video
artist, he spares no effort and takes on any risk to reach
the goals he has set himself, be it climbing a 7,000-meter
mountain, riding in a supersonic jet, or parachuting from
extreme altitudes. Pushing his physical strength to the
limit, Najjar puts himself in such extremely hostile (and
even life-threatening) situations to create photographs
and videos of high aesthetic quality that highlight the
artificially constructed nature of life and humanity’s
ubiquitous and increasingly manifest dependency on
technology—a dependency that is curiously foreshadowed inter alia already in Stanley Kubrick’s legendary
science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by the
way the astronauts are utterly reliant on the supercomputer HAL, which eludes their control. The resolutely
performative elements in Najjar’s photographic and video works allow viewers to participate intensively, and
sometimes immersively, in his experience. For his latest
project, “outer space”, Najjar will be taking a suborbital
flight, venturing into spheres where no artist before him
has ever generated images. The necessary preparations
for the flight—and hence for the production of images—
and the photographs that document them often reveal
more about the state of contemporary culture and general living conditions than many photos taken directly
on Earth ever could.
26
“What is really new, however, is that from now
on we will have to embrace beauty as the only
acceptable criterion of truth.”
Vilém Flusser, 19911
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary
in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”
Jean Baudrillard, 19782
One illuminating way to approach Michael Najjar’s works
is to embed them in a larger historical context; it seems
obvious that they form part of a series of important developments and events in the history of art and culture.
Let us first look back at Plato. His writings make it clear
that he attached no particular epistemological value to
the artist’s work and the creation of pictures, since art for
him depicted not what was truly important, namely the
idea, but merely what was already visible; in other words,
the visual arts were merely mimetic and thus simulative.
So it is hardly surprising that he had a pretty low opinion of what mimetic art could offer in terms of enriching our understanding with new insights and knowledge.
However, since the dawn of modernity, technological
progress and the invention of new instruments (such as
the telescope, microscope, camera, etc.) have increasingly placed humanity in a privileged position to see what
had remained hidden to the naked eye. This has also had
a decisive impact on the technologies and methods of
image production, an impact that became manifest with
the invention of scientific imaging techniques such as the
radiograph, the electron microscope, and the sonogram.
Never before have images enabled such a wealth of new
knowledge, which, moreover, also permeates and shapes
our everyday lives in a wide variety of ways. Especially in
the past few years digital technology has ratcheted up the
production of electronic imagery, unleashing a veritable—
and notorious—deluge of pictures. Concurrently, over the
past few years and decades, the natural sciences have also
shown an increasing tendency toward visualization. Even
so, many of their images are not representational in kind
but depictions of theoretical constructs and models expressed in visual terms, the outcome of complicated processes of translation. In art, too, pictures have increasingly become the visual expression of theoretical concepts.
John Michael Krois has argued on this that “the image is
27
de facto a connecting link between the theory of art and
the theory of science.”5 Similarly, the theorist and media
philosopher Vilém Flusser recognized the linkage between art—in this case, photography— and science early
on: “The technical image is an image produced by apparatuses. As apparatuses themselves are the products of applied scientific texts, in the case of technical images one
is dealing with the indirect products of scientific texts.”6
If we define art and science as methods to make the unknown known, the incomprehensible comprehensible,
and the invisible visible (Paul Klee), or in other words, as
methods for the visualization of complex systems, a wealth
of analogies emerge that can help explain the reciprocal
fascination between art and science. Basically, we can say
that both systems, art just as much as science, harbor a certain skepticism about reality or an existing epistemological dogma; yet both are impelled to explore the unknown
and use creativity to reveal new ways of perception. A further parallel lies in the category of the aesthetic: from time
to time research in the natural sciences will indeed take on
the quality of a quest for beauty. As the British mathematician Godfrey Hardy tellingly remarked in 1967: “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns […]
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful […] Beauty is the first test: there is no
permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”7 And
even in the field of physics, which is widely regarded as
dominated by technical considerations, the English physicist Paul Dirac remained convinced that physical laws
should be based on beautiful equations, and even that it is
more important “to have beauty in one’s equations than to
have them fit experiment.”8 Flusser, too, brought aesthetic criteria to bear on the natural sciences: “Copernicus is
better than Ptolemy, and Einstein is better than Newton,
because they provide more elegant models.”9
Fig. 1: View of the map of Florence known as the “Catena,”
attributed to Stefano Rosselli, c. 1472
Let us now leave the history of science and turn our attention to those socio-historical aspects that have a bearing
on the new territory in image-making that Michael Najjar
is treading in his art. The early nineteenth century was a
time of pioneering discoveries in both the natural sciences and technology leading to developments that have lost
none of their relevance even today. In 1798, on the threshold of what historians have come to call the “long” nineteenth century, Thomas Robert Malthus published his
Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued
that the growth of a population—provided that there
were no preventive checks of any kind in its way—would
be basically exponential, while the growth of resources
in terms of foodstuffs would be linear. Malthus believed
that sooner or later this would lead to conflicts over distribution, as there would no longer be sufficient food
available for all sections of the population. Malthus’s theory also encouraged Charles Darwin to push forward in
his research into the primary hypotheses he subsequently published in his legendary book The Origin of Species (1859), which established his theory of evolution.10
Michael Najjar’s photographs let us draw a connection
from the discoveries of Malthus and Darwin to space
flight and the endeavor to push back the boundaries of
research, not only to learn as much as possible about the
origins of the world, but also to develop new habitats for
humankind. Even if actual realization of such projects
may seem utopian from our present standpoint, such
programs are indeed real and are being prepared for the
eventuality that one day the earth will no longer be capable of supporting life or that some form of catastrophe
will occur and tip the planet and all life on it into a precarious situation.
Michael Najjar will be the first artist to fly to space and
use his experience of weightlessness to photograph the
Fig. 2: Jacopo de’ Barbari, aerial view of Venice, 1500
globe from a distance of some 100 kilometers; his pictures will be the provisional climax of a long history of
the evolution of art, an evolution in which the viewer, and
hence the artist, have occupied ever more elevated vantage points. At first imaginary, this increasing elevation
later became real, shifting from a horseman’s perspective to a bird’s-eye view, the view from an airplane, and
eventually to an orbital perspective. That this change of
perspective went hand in hand with the development of
technology is obvious enough. Let us look back again at
the Renaissance, a time when the ties between art, science, and technology were particularly intimate. There
is, for instance, a woodcut attributed to Stefano Rosselli
showing a view of Florence as seen from one of the surrounding hills (Fig. 1). The depiction of the artist in the
right-hand corner of the woodcut as a repoussoir figure
leaning over a sketchbook offers a certain warranty for
the authenticity of the view and its solid workmanship.11
One of the reasons why this mode of representation was
chosen might well be the “peculiar reluctance” Hans
Blumen­berg has detected in antiquity and the Middle
Ages “to view the world, or to conceive it as viewed by the
human eye, from above.”12 Such inhibitions should not be
surprising for, as Martina Hofmann has pointed out, Saint
Augustine himself had sternly warned against “admiring
spectacles of nature like the majestic peaks of the mountains […] and losing oneself in their pleasurable contemplation.”13 His attitude seems clear: looking down on the
world should be the privilege of God alone.14 Against
such an inauspicious backdrop, Jacopo de’ Barbari’s aerial view of Venice, created in 1500, seems nothing less
than a quantum leap (Fig. 2). This precise rendition of
the City of Bridges influenced many later depictions of
urban landscapes, yet its true significance is that what we
are dealing with here is neither the abstract cartographical representation of a city nor a careful chorographic
28
Fig. 4: Pieter Snayers, El sitio de Gravelinas, 1652
Fig. 3: Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander
at Issus, 1529
view of an urban landscape as though seen from the top
of a real hill, but a constructed perspective that is an immense feat of the imagination. With its inclusion of the
horizon line, it is more like an aviator’s than a bird’s-eye
view. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s supremely “modern” view of a
city in all its daring and world-embracing power of visualization is only surpassed by Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1529
painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus (Fig. 3), in which
“the extraordinary extraterrestrial bird’s-eye view transitions into a cosmic landscape.”15 Long before Giordano
Bruno postulated the infinite nature of the universe in his
De l’infinito, universo e mondi (1584)—for which he ended inter alia 1600 in Florence on the stake—and adopted
by Isaac Newton as base for his scientific work, showing
that our world in the universe is a mere speck of dust in
the cosmic order, Altdorfer’s revolutionary painting gave
a visual premonition of this thought.
Not as radical as Altdorfer, the battle scene landscapes
of Pieter Snayers are also of great interest in our context thanks to their topographical construction of landscape and composition of fractured perspectives. They
show various battles and sieges between the North and
South Netherlands that took place during the Dutch War
of Independence (1568–1648). Of particular note in the
eighteen-part series of paintings is El sitio de Gravelinas
(Fig. 4). The painting shows the siege of the Dutch city of
Grevelingen (now the French commune of Gravelines) as
seen from an imaginary hill. Reading the painting from
the bottom upwards, we see that while it begins by drawing the eye into illusionary depths dotted with numerous
figures, in the middle of painting the perspective suddenly soars up into the heights to give a bird’s-eye view of
the besieged town. The rupture where a realistic mode of
representation is abandoned favors the communication
of knowledge (in this instance, military, strategic, carto29
graphical, and chorographic knowledge). As we will see
in the photographs and videos of Michael Najjar, the interest in a (consistently) authentic landscape is subordinated to a higher level of reality.
With the increasing, though still imaginary, elevation of
the vantage point, which was also closely linked to the
development of technical devices like the telescope, attention also turned to the constellations in the heavens
in speculations that adumbrate the utopian vision of
space exploration. Cornelis Meijer’s book Osservazioni
delle comete (1696) includes an engraving in which an
extraterrestrial perspective offers us a view of the earth,
Saturn, and Jupiter, with giant men sitting on each celestial body observing the others through a telescope (Fig.
5). The picture’s ostensible subject is an early representation of the question of whether there is life on other
planets—posed at a time when scientific and theological
explanations of the world and interpretative paradigms
were being radically reconfigured.
If aerial views of cities or landscapes were still pure feats
of the imagination for artists such as de’ Barbari, Alt­
dorfer, and Leonardo,16 all this changed with the dawn
of aviation, when it actually became possible to draw aerial views ex caelo. The basic technical ideas for several
technically possible flying aerial vehicles were conceived
as early as the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (also known as doctor mirabilis);
Leonardo subsequently designed various flying machines
as well. The first functioning aircraft capable of carrying passengers, however, was not built until the end of
the eighteenth century, when the Montgolfier brothers
designed their hot air balloon.17 On November 21, 1783,
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent,
Marquis d’Arlandes, flew over Paris on the first manned
Fig. 5: Cornelis Meijer, Osservazioni delle comete, 1696
Fig. 6: Thomas Baldwin, A Balloon
Prospect from Above the Clouds, 1786
flight in the history of humankind. Two years later,
Thomas Baldwin made sketches during a balloon flight
over the county of Cheshire in England at an altitude of
some 2,100 meters he later published in a graphic in 1786:
the first authentic aerial view18 (Fig. 6). The special merit of the plate is that it shows the landscape of Cheshire
with the River Mersey and the town of Warrington not
(solely) as a cartographic plan or chorographic view; its
rigorous verticality instead suggests, in an anticipation
of a future technology, the mode of a photographic view.
The plate shows the white cumulus clouds (which actually prevent an unhindered direct view of the surface of
the Earth) and their shadows floating over the landscape
as well as explanatory lines tracing the balloon’s flight
path. It is primarily due to this authentic rendition of the
view, the momentary and fragmentary nature of the gaze
from on high transformed into an image, that makes the
print so important for the history of media and culture.
Its mode of representation combines the “aerial view”
of the landscape from the age of post-aerostatic aviation
with the techniques of “augmented reality”: the addition
of a further layer of reality and information to an existing
pictorial layer.
Since Michael Najjar works as a photography and video
artist, it makes sense at this point to take a short excursion into the history of photography and the concomitant
evolution of the manipulation of technical reproductions
of reality. In parallel with the pioneering discoveries and
developments in many fields of science, politics, and society, the nineteenth century also succeeded in developing
a technology based on chemical-physical reactions that
was capable of reproducing reality as a two-dimensional
image—first with the daguerreotype, which then evolved
into the photograph.19 At first glance, the invention of
photography seemed to signal the birth of truthfulness,
since the photograph was held to be an unimpeachable
guarantor of the authentic reproduction of reality. As late
as 1925 Rudolf Arnheim could still assert in good faith that
“photography is, first and foremost, the true and faithful image of reality.”20 Yet only a few years later Bertolt
Brecht sounded a warning note—a caveat strangely prophetic of the technologies of the digital world to come—
writing that “the photographic apparatus can lie just as
easily as the typesetting machine.”21 Even before the mass
of opportunities for manipulation offered by digital imaging technology came along, a certain degree of skepticism was voiced about the photographic apparatus and
its productions. To quote Hubert Damisch’s lukewarm
verdict: “In its capacity as a machine that is not intended to enhance vision (the camera is not a telescope) but
rather to produce images, the apparatus must be regarded with suspicion,” particularly since “the photographic
process can only be carried out in darkness.”22 Now, at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, after nearly two
centuries of the photographic reproduction of reality,
and despite our awareness of retouching and the seemingly endless possibilities of digital image processing, or
in other words, of image manipulation and thus the manipulation of reality (brought to us by media)—even now
we are still inclined, when we first look at a photograph,
to believe that what it conveys is authentic, as we do with
Michael Najjar’s photographs. The technical innovations
in image generation and dissemination since the late
twentieth century have given rise to an unprecedented
variety of ways to manipulate digital imagery. The production and dissemination of images have now reached
an incredible perfection in the thorough mixing of semblance and reality, truth and falsehood. In philosophical
terms, the assessment of semblance or illusion has varied
widely in the cultural history of the Western world. Plato,
for instance—think of the essential meaning of his Alle30
gory of the Cave—condemned all semblance because he
thought it stood in the way of truth, or more accurately,
of our gaining knowledge of the truth. The young Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, glorified all semblance
because he saw the deceptive illusion as a fundamental
prerequisite of human existence.23 In the mid-twentieth
century, Theodor W. Adorno considered semblance and
truth not as mutually exclusive opposites but instead emphasized their mutual dependency, as truth could only be
defined as what emerges from semblance as its other.24
And against the backdrop of the advent of the digital revolution, Vilém Flusser asked: “Why does the apparition
deceive? Is there anything that does not deceive? This
is the decisive question, the epistemological question
[...] If we talk about the ‘digital apparition,’ this and no
other question has to be addressed.”25 In the early twenty-first century, in an age of “virtual” and “augmented
reality,” the borderlines between illusion and reality are
ever more blurry, giving rise to a pluralistic coexistence
of semblance and reality that sometimes spawns conflicts
in the social sphere. So we do need to ask whether the
attempt to differentiate between appearance and reality
is not in itself illusory. In contemporary media art, the
distinction has long been obsolete, and the interplay between categories of illusion and reality has become a constitutive element in numerous works and installations.
We shall return to the intimate linkage of appearance and
reality in Najjar’s photography.
So far we have touched on the two main technological
requirements for aerial imaging techniques: aviation and
photography. It was only a question of time before the
two technologies would come together. Paris, where the
first manned flight took place, is also central to the intersection between aviation and photography. It was the
photographer, writer, and entrepreneur Gaspard-Félix
31
Tournachon, better known as Nadar, who, in 1858, took
the first photograph from a balloon above Paris. After
several unsuccessful attempts to photograph from a balloon in continual motion during which “whole clouds of
hydrogen sulfide” contaminated the photographer’s silver iodide bath, thwarting the chemical development of
the photographs, Nadar finally succeeded in taking the
first aerial photograph at Petit-Bicêtre near Paris in the
early morning of October 23, 1858.26
Developments in aviation technology and aerial photography continued in the late nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, the German army experimented with rocket photography—a new stage in the push to drive the
photographic vantage point even higher up into the atmosphere.27 In 1891, Ludwig Rohrmann patented a photographic system that involved attaching a camera to a
large-caliber artillery projectile or rocket, shooting it
into the air and letting it glide to Earth on a parachute
while it would automatically take photos. After Alfred
Maul patented his improved rocket cameras in 1903, the
following years saw cameras shot to a height of some 800
meters which also, after reaching their apex, sailed back
to Earth hanging from parachutes and took chronometer-triggered pictures from a perfect vertical perspective
on their descent.28 These early missiles were still fired
with gunpowder; in the 1920s and 1930s, work began on
the development of rocket engines, which in theory made
it possible to push the photographic vantage point still
further outward in the direction of the Earth’s orbit. Already in 1923, Hermann Oberth, one of the physicists involved in the development of rocket technology, dreamt
of “building a machine” that could “rise higher than the
Earth’s atmosphere”; not least important among the uses
he envisioned were surveillance and the generation of
image data for economic and military purposes.29
In outer space, however, there is a point at which the
quality of photography is subject to the law of diminishing returns, since ever greater heights do not necessarily
imply ever better overviews—at least not of the Earth.
The progress of insight into the surface of the Earth
collapses at the latest with space flight, since at some
point our planet will be simply lost in the vast depths
of the universe and surrender to absolute scale. Long
before Charles and Ray Eames made their famous film
Powers of Ten (1977), the Dutch educator Kees Boeke
in his 1954 graphic essay Cosmic View took readers on
an imaginary journey that opens with a girl sitting in
a courtyard; magnification by successive powers of ten
lead into outer space in one direction and then, in the
other direction, into the world of molecules and atoms
in a trajectory that soon reveals the limitations of excessive perspective.30
Michael Najjar is safe, at least for the time being, from
any danger of excessive elevation: the altitudes at which
he shoots, or rather will shoot, still permit an excellent
overview of the world and its appearance. What is more,
he is not concerned with strategic, economic, or scientific insight but rather with questions of an aesthetic
and philosophical order. With his unswerving urge and
his passion for cutting-edge technology in aeronautics,
Najjar is a latter-day incarnation of the leading proponents of Futurism. Sharing their furor, he burns with
the same kind of enthusiasm for art and technology—
two systems that were by and large mutually exclusive
until Futurism came along. Najjar pours the same kind
of energy into contemporary media that artists such as
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Enrico
Prampolini, or Tullio Crali, in the final phase of Futurism in the 1930s, invested in aeropittura—painting inspired by the experience of flight—and finally in their
arte cosmica. Like Najjar, these artists were fascinated by
dynamics, disorientating experiences and, above all, by
the latest modern technology.31 But let us begin at the beginning, or rather at the bottom, since Michael Najjar’s
development as an artist has proceeded from the ground
up, in keeping with the historical development we have
outlined from the surface of the Earth to the edge of
outer space. The fundamental principles underpinning
his aesthetic conceptions are based on simulation, the
transgression of boundaries, and the engagement with
cutting-edge technology; the performative act is also becoming increasingly central to his work. Najjar can be
compared to the man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who
has succeeded in climbing out of the realm of shadows to
the surface of the Earth and then returns to tell his former fellow captives about his new understanding of the
world. We too have long had to accept the fact that we
increasingly learn about “true” reality through (digital)
media and not through our own eyes; not from personal
experience but from information filtered and communicated through the Internet, television, and telecommunications. As the social theorist Niklas Luhmann
famously wrote on this, “whatever we know about our
society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we
know through the mass media.”32 To understand this is
also to accept, or at be aware, that data, texts, and images
are (or may be) manipulated.
At this point the ambivalence of the term simulation
comes into play. The term is ambivalent because, on the
one hand, simulation means pretending something is true
when it is not, as when a person says they are sick when
they are in the best of health. On the other hand, simulation in a scientific context refers to a biological, physical, psychological, or other kind of scenario designed to
produce important findings in advance of a real-world
situation. Hence the enormous significance of simulation
in aviation and space flight, because only a meticulous
mock-up of, say, a space station, extensive simulations of
the shuttle’s flight, and similar models make it possible to
test workflows and experimental setups before deployment in order to avert the threat of possible damage to
people and materials. Connecting the concept of simulation to the categories of appearance and reality, we can
see an implosion of the difference between true and false
that was first diagnosed many years ago. As Jean Baudrillard pointed out, this is initially a matter of “substituting
the signs of the real for the real.”33 Simulative scenarios
of this kind appear with some frequency in the works of
Michael Najjar. But “simulation threatens the difference
between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’”34 Despite all our experience of manipulation, the
viewer contemplating a photograph frequently slips into
the guise of a stoic expectant of the true and is constantly unsettled as to whether what the photograph shows is
authentic or not, true or not. Najjar accordingly uses “a
strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal.”35
His works of art function in part on the basis of simulations that were either “real” during the creative process or
applied during postproduction as part of the digital composition of “reality.” In spite of—or more accurately put,
precisely due to—the simulative elements of photography,
they reveal quite a lot about the state of the world and
generate insight through their overflow of knowledge.
Only a few years back Michael Najjar was engaged in photographing simulated scenarios of war; yet ever since the
“netropolis” series (2003–2006) his progress in scaling
ever greater heights has seemed unstoppable. For this,
his first series of hybrid photographs,36 which “depict”
various major cities across the world in numerous digitally superimposed photographs, Najjar drew on both his
cunning and his sense of adventure to gain access to the
highest floors of the tallest skyscrapers in each city (often
closed to the general public for security reasons), from
which vantage point he trained his camera on the megacities extending in all directions below him. What he
created are not legible portraits of the cities in the proper
sense of the word, but rather palimpsest-like superimpositions of individual black-and-white views which, similar to the imagery that has settled at the bottom of the
human mind, render a diffuse image of the city and—as is
particularly striking in the case of Los Angeles—refer to
its hyperreality.37
The next higher stage was the climbing of South America’s Mount Aconcagua, at seven thousand meters. The
first attempt to reach the summit had to be called off;
Najjar reached it on his second attempt, against the advice of his mountain guide and without a breathing apparatus. This extreme feat of physical endurance was
32
rewarded with a sensational view and a series of photos
the artist used for his “high altitude” series (2008–2010).
The supreme perfection of the finished hybrid photos, whose partly simulated character is often apparent
only upon closer inspection or altogether invisible, combines authentic views with added digital components.
The conceptual underpinning of the photographs may
be decoded by a comparative viewing of several works:
then it becomes apparent that all the mountain ranges
shown have similar rock formations that bear a certain
resemblance to modulated amplitude waves. If some of
the rock masses seem at least halfway realistic, a work
like “nasdaq_80–09” explodes any notion of reality: it is
a visualization of the NASDAQ index between 1980 and
2009. The particularly high peaks indicate the dynamic development of the new economy and the general
increase in data volume and volatility. Michael Najjar’s
aesthetic transfer in the “high altitude” series is an especially striking illustration of what he is about: just as
the subjects of his photography have abandoned their
grounding in reality, the international financial market,
aided by the development of technology, has now largely relocated to a virtual realm. The commodity trade and
the exchange of goods and services have been replaced
by a virtual market in which shares can change hands up
to two hundred times a second in algorithm-driven high
frequency trading. The sheer speed and volume of virtual trading blurs any relation, eludes proper control, and
erodes risk assessment. As in the photographs, much of
stock exchange trading is built on an illusion; the more
or less patently constructed nature of the photographs
brings to the forefront analogies between them and the
artificial and sometimes deliberately manipulative construction of textual and visual information both on the
stock exchange and in the media.
“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this Earth
from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we
moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually
falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing?” Friedrich Nietzsche
wondered in The Gay Science.38 We could be forgiven for
thinking that he wrote this after accompanying Michael
Najjar in the cockpit of a MiG-29 on his supersonic flight
at an altitude up to 20,000 meters. The video “equilibrium” (2013) can only give an inadequate impression of
what Najjar himself experienced—the blurred horizon,
the sudden plunges into weightlessness, the scrambling
of up and down. What it also conceals is that, despite all
the professionalism of the pilot, the outer limits of what
is technically and physically possible have here been
reached. It is a perfect dissimulation in the sense Baudrillard gave the term: pretending that loss of control simply
cannot happen, that failure is impossible. The slightest
error on the part of the pilot, the technical failure of an instrument, or a momentary loss of consciousness—Najjar
almost blacked out during the flight under the impact of
seven times the force of gravity—would have been enough
to doom both man and machine. Despite the viewer’s
own lack of direct experience of such conditions, the
photos and video taken during the flight do communicate
33
a powerful sense of loss of orientation, of being helplessly at the mercy of a technology beyond one’s control. Yet
what they most pointedly reveal is a complete reliance on
that technology, vicariously enacted by the artist himself,
and our own submission to its energy. In a well-known
argument, Arnold Gehlen described the human being,
in contradistinction to the animal, as a “deficient being”
(Mängelwesen); 39 in the course of evolution, and especially since the advent of the industrial revolution, man has
increasingly developed into a dependent being, reliant
on energy, technology, telecommunications. We live in a
highly complex and differentiated world that, despite all
its incredible achievements and systems designed to provide security and protection, is still in a precarious state of
equilibrium, as catastrophes such as Chernobyl, 9/11, and
Fukushima all too clearly show. Regardless of what the
causes of such catastrophes might be, each time their impact is a painful reminder of the fragility of our existence.
Over and beyond all aesthetic considerations, Najjar’s art
succeeds in conveying an intimation of the constructed
nature of life as well as its immense tenuousness.
The flight in a Russian fighter jet was another stage in
preparation for a flight that still lies ahead of him: Michael Najjar will be the first artist in outer space, in the
realm of weightlessness. In addition to the flight in the
supersonic jet, various parabolic flight maneuvers also
formed part of his exercises in which Najjar rode in a
converted Ilyushin IL-76 jet that gained an altitude of
some 8,000 meters and then took a near-vertical plunge
for 22 seconds of weightlessness. These maneuvers were
repeated several times in succession. Another of his
preparations involved using a centrifuge at the German
Aerospace Center in Cologne, where he was exposed to
forces of up to four times gravity. Both in the parabolic
flights and in the centrifuge, Najjar acted both as a conceptual artist who had prepared a storyboard and gone
through every conceivable and desired shot with the
photographer, and as a protagonist in the true sense of
the word, using his own body for the performative action.
In this second respect, Najjar’s work is akin to body art, in
which artists in the 1960s discovered the use of their own
bodies as a material, as well as performance art, which
resulted from a fusion of the traditional performing arts
and visual art. Even if there is no actual audience present
during Najjar’s flights and jumps except for the photographers and pilots, his photographs and videos document
the performative act and enable the audiences seeing his
exhibitions to participate in the preparations and enactment, and thus in the creative process of his art.
To prepare for his excursion into the zero gravity of space,
Najjar also had to put himself through a whole series of
simulations and test situations. Beyond the supersonic
flight and exposure to centrifugal forces, a diving routine
was a further stage in his training. This took place at the
bottom of a twelve-meter-deep giant water tank at the
Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia, which holds a lifesized model of the Russian module of the ISS International Space Station. Najjar was lowered into the tank in a
space suit whose weight of 150 kilograms, in combination
with the buoyancy in the water, simulated a condition of
more or less perfect weightlessness. In his descent, he
was accompanied by safety divers and photographers,
whose pictures of this non-place show a doubly hostile
environment where the deep water of the tank stands in
for the airless vacuum of space. It is tempting to identify
the places shown in the photographs as those so famously
described by Michel Foucault as “heterotopias,”40 places
with a different, even incongruous, definition of time and
reality. The reality of the tank with its mass of water and
model of the ISS is matched by the unreality of its simulative character. To increase the heterotopic confusion
still further, one of the photographs has been digitally enhanced—the blue globe of “Spaceship Earth”41 floating in
space can be seen through a porthole of the water tank.
The inside of a water tank on Earth simultaneously becomes the airless vacuum of outer space.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, who coined the term “Spaceship Earth” for our planet in his 1968 Operation Manual,
was concerned in this and other writings with the question of whether humankind had a chance to survive as
a species and if so, then how.42 The American architect,
philosopher, and visionary is probably best known for his
invention of the geodesic dome, a structure whose most
famous realization is the Biosphère Fuller built at the U.S.
pavilion for the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal. Fuller pondered the survival of life on Earth at the height of the Cold
War; by contrast, the Eden Project in Cornwall, launched
in 2001, investigates the possibilities of plant growth
and thus life itself outside the Earth’s atmosphere—be
it on a spaceship or on another planet. The pictures in
Michael Najjar’s “space garden” (2013) are photo-collages of a variety of plants from the Eden Project that have
been digitally stitched together with such skill that they
now seem to float under the geodesic dome as though in
zero gravity. The artist has studied ways of overcoming
Earth’s gravitation and reflected on possibilities of life (or
the survival of life) away from our planet in his works; he
has explored the associated and ever more sophisticated
technologies for sounding even deeper into the past of
our universe and uses their findings to offer insights into
our own existence (as in “golden eye,” 2012). In his “space
debris” (2012), Najjar points out the problems and risks
of space travel itself. Not only the Earth, its oceans and
atmosphere, suffer heavily from pollution, there are now
also more than 600,000 bits of space junk of various sizes in orbit around our planet at speeds of around 28,000
kilometers per hour. The photographs and video installation in this series give a persuasive visualization of the
range of issues involved. “space debris” is a demonstration of how art, technology, and science can be brought
together in a compelling symbiosis in a work of art and
of how the work’s aesthetic qualities can coexist with a
presentation of issues of social and political importance
and thus help disseminate new knowledge and insights.
gravitational pull of the Earth and the dynamics of free
fall is incapacitated. It is a moment whose extreme intensity one has to experience firsthand in order to have
any inkling of what it means. On the one hand, this is the
highest speed that the human body can reach without
propulsion; on the other hand, the physical circumstances of the moment simulate standstill for a few seconds—a
greater paradox can hardly be imagined.
“Irony is the form of paradox,” the philosopher Friedrich
Schlegel noted at the dawn of the nineteenth century.43
Arguably, it is the irony of evolution, and thus of our own
existence, that we must resign ourselves to living with
paradoxes. On the one hand, technology and science
move forward at an ever-increasing pace; ever more novel technologies and techniques give people ever more
mobility, ever more information, and greater opportunities to choose between alternatives. On the other hand,
however, and concurrently, our dependency on technology, on certain systems or forms of organization, becomes
ever greater. At the very least, we may say that one of
the most universal goals of humankind—the goal of freedom—will not necessarily be reached through technological progress. And this too is evident in Michael Najjar’s
photographs, which offer fascinating insights into many
unknown or inaccessible regions. His works explore the
crossing of one of the last imaginable frontiers—overcoming the force of gravity and space travel—which in
turn inevitably implies the utmost dependency on technology. At the same time, moreover, Najjar’s works raise
the question of which directions such developments are
heading in: will the utopias developed since the modern
age be realized one day—will we, for example, colonize
other planets? And what might future forms of social
organization look like? When the spheres of art and science fuse and visual art becomes a partner in research, it
should also chart an approach to the complexity of that
research, without betraying itself in the process. The
photographs and videos of Najjar make their own aesthetically impressive and utterly distinctive contribution
to this endeavor. Michael Najjar knows his “chemistry,”
and he knows his science too. Such transdisciplinary synergy cannot but yield good pictures.
When Michael Najjar, wearing an oxygen mask, performs multiple HALO, or High Altitude – Low Opening,
tandem parachute jumps from a height of 10,000 meters,
the standard cruising altitude of commercial flights, he
experiences for a short moment what otherwise can only
be experienced in zero gravity: the extremely thin air
obliterates any sensation of the actual speed of the fall
(around 300 kilometers per hour). The feeling for the
34
1Vilém Flusser, “Digital Apparition,” trans. Andreas
Broeckmann, in Timothy Druckrey, ed., Electronic Culture:
Technology and Visual Representation (New York, 1996), 245.
2Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations—I. The
Precession of Simulacra,” trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, http://
www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-of-simulacra/.
3Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe,
vol. 1, Sudelbücher I, notebook J (1789–1793), ed. Wolfgang
Promies (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 772.
4Jean Mignot, quoted in Konrad Hecht, Maß und Zahl in
der gotischen Baukunst (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York,
1979), 167.
5John Michael Krois, “Was sind und was sollen Bilder?”
16 See, for instance, his cartographic view of the Italian
31Unlike Michael Najjar, however, many Futurist artists
17 Dieter R. Bauer and Wolfgang Behringer, “Annäherung
32 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media [1995],
trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, 2000), 1.
town of Imola (1504).
an eine menschliche Sensation: Fliegen und Schweben.
Zur Einführung,” in Bauer and Behringer, eds., Fliegen und
Schweben: Annäherungen an eine menschliche Sensation
(Munich, 1997), 8. For other utopias of flight see also Wolfgang Behringer, “Ars volandi. Gedankenspiele im Umfeld
einer europäischen Debatte der Neuzeit,” in the same
volume.
18 See also Caren Kaplan, “The Balloon Prospect. Aero-
static Observatorium and the Emergence of Militarised
Aeromobility,” in Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Alison
J. Williams, eds., From Above. War, Violence and Verticality
(London, 2013), 35.
in Kunst als Wissenschaft—Wissenschaft als Kunst [2001], 2
(http://wissenschaft-als-kunst.de/multimedia/Krois.pdf ).
die Veröffentlichung der Fotografie (Munich, 2014).
6Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans.
20 Rudolf Arnheim, “Die Seele in der Silberschicht” [1925],
Anthony Mathews (London, 2000), 14.
7Godfrey Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (http://www.
math.ualberta.ca/mss/misc/A%20Mathematician’s%20
Apology.pdf ), 14.
19 See Steffen Siegel, ed., Neues Licht: Daguerre, Talbot und
in Arnheim, Die Seele in der Silberschicht: Medientheoretische Texte. Photographie – Film – Rundfunk, ed. Helmut H.
Diederichs (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 11.
21 Bertolt Brecht [1931], in Brecht, Werke. Große kommen-
had a fatal attraction to struggle and war.
33 Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations.”
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Michael Najjar uses the term “hybrid photography”
to describe photographs composed in the studio out of
digitized authentic film material and digital additions. In
such pictures, reproduced reality and digitally created
reality are indissolubly fused.
37 Jean Baudrillard has given the following diagnosis of the
Californian megacity: “Los Angeles and the whole of America which surrounds it are no longer real but belong to the
hyperreal order and the order of simulation.” Baudrillard,
“Simulacra and Simulations.”
38 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude in
German Rhymes and an Appendix, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff,
ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 120.
8Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physi-
tierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht,
Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller
(Frankfurt am Main, 1988–2000), vol. 21, 515.
39 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World
cist’s Picture of Nature,” Scientific American 208, no. 5 (May
1963): 47.
9Flusser, “Digital Apparition,” 245.
22 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John
Architecture /Mouvement /Continuité 5 (October, 1984):
46–49 (http://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/
foucault.heterotopia.en.html).
10 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life (London, 1859).
Goodman (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), xv.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15
(New York, 1983), 13.
40 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,”
Bänden, vol. 7, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari
(Munich and Berlin, 1988), 199.
41 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for
Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an
Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, 1955), vol. 1.
24 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), 100ff.
42 See also, for instance, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Utopia
12 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt
25 Flusser, “Digital Apparition,” 242.
11 Reproduced in Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian
am Main, 1966), 336; quoted in Christoph Asendorf, “Von
der ‘Weltlandschaft’ zur planetarischen Perspektive. Der
Blick von oben in der Sukzession neuzeitlicher Raumvorstellungen,” kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und
Kulturwissenschaft 3 (2009): 17.
13 Martina Hofmann, Der Blick vom Gipfel auf die Welt. Aus-
gewählte Beispiele zur Etablierung eines literarischen Motivs,
Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (unpublished dissertation,
2014), 38.
14 Augustine’s original Latin runs, “Et eunt homines
mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos
lapsus fluminum et Oceani ambitum et gyros siderum, et
relinquunt se ipsos [...].” Saint Augustine, Confessiones.
Bekenntnisse. Lateinisch und deutsch, book 10, 2nd ed.
(Munich, 1960), 508–10.
15 Asendorf, “Von der ‘Weltlandschaft’ zur planetarischen
Perspektive,” 12.
35
26 Nadar, “Quand j’étais photographe” [1900], http://www.
photocriticism.com/members/archivetexts/photohistory/
nadar/pf/nadarquand1pf.html
27 Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World from
the Air and Outer Space (New York, 1969), 43. Newhall adds:
“The idea of shooting a camera into the air was not, even
then, new: in 1888 the magazine La Nature described the
photo rocket, photo-fusée, of Amédée Denisse.”
28 Ibid., 46. Newhall also notes the patent awarded to Julius
Neubronner in Germany in 1903. Neubronner invented also
a pigeon camera, which took photographs of its surroundings every thirty seconds (ibid., 48).
29 Hermann Oberth, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen
(Munich and Berlin, 1923), 7.
30 Kees Boeke, The Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps
(New York, 1957).
Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, 1968).
or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (Toronto and New
York, 1969).
43 Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary
Aphorisms, trans. and introd. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc
(University Park, Pa., 1968), 126 (fragment 48).
Some quotes have been translated into English.