After the "Blue Marble": A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 MAŁGORZATA SUGIERA After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos To demonstrate how visual representations have determined the current assessment of our planet as knowable and open to globally scaled terraforming projects in a singular climate emergency, the article focuses on the image of the whole Earth, taken from space in the early 1970s, and dubbed Blue Marble. Against this background, it introduces Raqs Media Collective’s video essay The Bicyclist Who Fell into a TimeCone (2023) which features ways of living otherwise – on and with the planet – by mobilising and combining particular situated, trans-scalar alter-histories and presenting them in a decentred and self-reflexive way as scenes which critically engage the planetary perspective. Anthropocene Anthropo(s)cene More-than-Human Art-Science Cohabitation Planetary Situated Knowledges Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Why ‘s’ Matters? Rapidly growing discourses about the Anthropocene demonstrate how much the stories we tell about our world matter in times of uncertainty and deepening disorientation. This is particularly significant because this new epoch in the history of the Earth has also been named differently to highlight its distinctive features or outline the hierarchy of its significant aspects. However, what matters are not only the stories but also the ways in which we tell them. For this reason, a few years ago, Steve Mentz called for pluralising and entangling multiple historical Anthropocenes, with the idea of openly intermingling scientific observations and cultural obsessions. In his Break Up the Anthropocene, he explained: “We must refuse the antihistoricism of once-and-for-all origin stories and the anthropocentrism that can only make sense of human stories on human scales. To construct a pluralized Anthropocene, multiple possible conceptions of this epoch must overlap, connect, and entangle in ways that may seem only partially legible.”1 Also, Mentz insisted that both words from Ancient Greek which make up the term Anthropocene – anthropo- (human) and -cene (new or recent) – should be carefully rethought. One way of doing it, is not just to adapt the already normalised usage of the well-known notion Anthropocene but, as this INSERT issue has chosen, to introduce a more speculative term Anthropo(s)cene.2 In this altered version, pronounced the same way, the inserted ‘s’ changes the suffix -cene into -scene, inviting a way of looking at the planet as trans-scalar, situated scenes for human activities. This moderate shift, I would like to argue, may change our understanding of how Anthropoids relate with and to the Earth. The Cambridge Dictionary lists several meanings of the noun scene, borrowed partly from French (scene) and partly from Latin (scēna).3 When speaking about a scene, we may refer to part of a play or film; a view or a picture of a place, event, or activity (a scene of a crime); or a particular area of activity (a political scene), as well as the people or things connected to it (who arrive/come/appear on the scene). Because a place, event or activity may be real or imaginary, the meaning of the word scene approximates that of the noun stage, particularly in the idiomatic expression ‘to set the scene/stage’. In other words, although the two nouns are not always synonymous, in some contexts and phrases they may mean the same thing. Bearing these definitions in mind, it is worth taking a closer look at the Théâtres du monde: Fabriques de la nature en Occident, the inspiring study recently published by Frédérique AïtTouati, the French historian of science and literature, and theatre director. According to Aït-Touati, because Earth became a specific type of philosophical theatre at the dawn of modernity, an inquiry into the origins and history of this trope in Western thinking may help us understand the current crisis regarding Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 the ways in which humans imagine, depict and inhabit the planet. Seeking to rethink and renew the Western arts of inhabiting Earth, Aït-Touati comprehensively analyses the uses of fiction and narrative in astronomy and geography in the seventeenth century. In this period, the map and the stage became laboratories – spaces for modelling and effectively reconfiguring ways of living.4 The history of how various maps and globes contribute to how we have been constructing representations of our planet ever since is already richly documented. In her book, Aït-Touati follows another, far less-known – yet equally fateful and developing in parallel – history of what she calls spatial arts (architecture and scenography, among others). She considers spatial arts to be a valuable historical marker for understanding changes in our relationship to the terrestrial and outer spaces, tested and played out inside enclosed realms. Already in her earlier article “Arts of Inhabiting: Ancient and New Theatres of the World”, which takes up the same subject, she writes: “Theater in particular, through its ability to serve as a laboratory of space, and through its modeling power, has been able to embody very physically ways of inhabiting the Earth, and ways of conceiving of oneself in the world”.5 Employing perspective as one of the most powerful techniques to put the world in a theatre, stage machinery literally transformed nature into a spectacle – a mainly passive background for human actions. René Descartes proposed a philosophical reformulation of this concept of nature in “Meteorology”, an essay published together with his famous Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology in the late 1630s.6 Depicting weather phenomena like a spectacle of nature on a baroque stage, he conceptualised and analysed the natural world as theatrical machinery which a human being may learn to master. “The modern relationship to space is indeed a staging”, concludes Aït-Touati, “where humans are disembodied eye observing the world”.7 As I will show in the following, we may also find a similarly detached position of observation as an emblem of human mastery over passive nature in the current debate about the Anthropocene – whether it should be criticised, maintained or reinterpreted. In this context, Aït-Touati is convinced that adequately adapting our modes of being to the current polycrisis “will require thinking of the Earth as a shared stage and, more radically, as a space that is constantly manufactured by living beings, and not as a backdrop”.8 By introducing the notion of “the Earth as a shared stage”, which better reflects an indispensable opening up of the stage to a shadowed off-stage, the author of “Arts of Inhabiting” mostly considers more-than-human beings. However, to rework the concept of the Earth in times of radical, multipronged disturbances, when our surroundings are becoming increasingly unfamiliar or even threatening, more is needed than just a relational concept of “a shared Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 stage”. It is necessary to challenge and resist the established notions of a (theatrical) stage and replace them, for instance, by scene which covers a far larger variety of geological, climatic and anthropic contexts. Understood as a particular area of activity, which includes the people or agents connected to it, such a concept may also become helpful in differentiating the world in which the Moderns lived, from the world in which, and with which, we seek to live – a world of many worlds/worldings. In what follows, there is a reason why I think about and read the Anthropo(s)cene as a concept akin to Anna Tsing’s patchy Anthropocene, which she defines as a trans-scalar occurrence composed of varied assemblages of liveability.9 She introduced the concept to challenge the dominant way of thinking about the current geological epoch on a planetary scale, deployed as a singular form, susceptible not only to managerial command and technocratic control but also to imperial infrastructures of extraction and surveillance as primary modes of knowing. Significantly, Tsing borrowed the term patch from landscape ecology where it is defined as a relatively homogeneous area which has a definite shape and spatial configuration and, thus, visibly differs from its surroundings. Such a basic unit within a dynamically shifting and fluctuating landscape helps identify and follow the anthropogenic environmental changes which, as Tsing explains in her article “Earth Stalked by Man”, “exist[s] only in and through those patches”.10 While she thought mainly about specific entanglements of humans and their more-than-human environments, I search for ways to challenge the normative master narrative of both terraforming the Earth and colonising outer space, which has been told as a single planetary history. The narrative has emerged out of scientific and technological progress grounded in a singular (capitalist) economy that offered us an (illusory) possibility of seeing Earth as a graspable object fully in our governance and responsibility. To the same end, this story is still prominent in planetary-scale contemporary environmental science that maps the planet as a system of systems. For this reason, this narrative has become the object of critique in the context of both the patchy Anthropocene and the Anthropo(s)cene. I start my argument by discussing the power of influence exerted by the image of the whole Earth, taken from space in the early 1970s, and dubbed Blue Marble.11 I do so to demonstrate how this visual representation has determined the current assessment of our planet as knowable and open to globally scaled terraforming projects in a singular climate emergency, as the field of Earth System Science (ESS) would have it. Thus, I will cursorily map the influences between the early phase of human-planetary politics and today’s renewed interest in the conquest of space. Against this background, I will introduce Raqs Media Collective’s video essay The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, streamed as part of the Cosmos Cinema educational programme of the 14th Shanghai Biennale in 2024. Raqs Media Collective was founded by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta in New Delhi in 1992. Since Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 then, they have developed a hybrid practice situated at the intersection of contemporary arts and media, historical enquiry and philosophical speculation, experimenting with found archival footage and digitally animated hand-drawn figures and topologies. As I will demonstrate, their video essay features ways of living otherwise – on and with the planet – by mobilising and combining particular situated, trans-scalar alter-histories and presenting them in a decentred and self-reflexive way as scenes which critically engage the planetary perspective. Capturing the Planet A widely reproduced, iconic photograph taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, commonly known as Blue Marble, shows a brilliantly lit view of our planet which fills most of the frame. It is a depiction of a ‘whole’ Earth, contrary to the earlier 1968 photograph Earthrise that displays only a partially illuminated planet. That is why, as Chris Russill explains in his chapter “Earth Imaging”,12 Blue Marble was often misidentified as an original object of entrepreneur and environmental activist Stewart Brand’s campaign for an image of the whole Earth, launched in the late 1960s, against NASA’s Cold Warinfluenced approach to space travel as a way to escape the no-longerhabitable planet in the wake of a nuclear war. FIG. 1 Blue Marble , December 7–10, 1972. Mission: Apollo-Saturn 17 – The planet Earth with the continent of Africa clearly depicted, on the last United States lunar voyage. FIG. 2 Earthrise , December 21–27, 1968. Mission: Apollo-Saturn 8 – The planet Earth seen rising above the surface of the Moon, captured during the first human orbit of the Moon. Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 It was actually Earthrise that inspired Brand to comment in 1977: “For the first time humanity saw itself from the outside. […] Humanities’ habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to”.13 Significantly, Brand firmly believed in the transformative force of this earlier image to influence humanity’s behaviour. He summed up how this view from the outside helped raise ecological awareness: “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior – the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of global economy, and so on”.14 As Russill suggests, although both photographs – Earthrise and Blue Marble – similarly gave priority to the human eye, the latter gained more cultural authority because, in the 1970s, it better satisfied the expectation of what the planet should look like from outer space. Thus, Russill explains: “The ability to envision the whole earth in a glance generates cultural authority for ‘the global,’ a conception reorganizing our sense of environment, politics, and economy”.15 However, while such images reconfigured the cultural politics of Earth, in regard to stewardship and accountability for our only home, nowadays they support the idea of a ‘One World’, which embraces a singular planetary climate emergency, sanctioning terraforming on a global scale. It is worth recalling that almost two decades after Brand’s praise of the powerful influence of the whole earth photographed from space, the astronomer Carl Sagan juxtaposed Blue Marble with Pale Blue Dot, a lesserknown picture of Earth in its complete solar environs, recorded by NASA’s Voyager 1 at the exact moment when the interstellar probe was leaving our solar system. Whereas, as Sagan emphasised, the former image shows our exceptionalism, the latter illustrates the total dependence of humans on “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark”.16 This stark contrast between the scales of the two visual representations of our globe, and the affect they triggered, stems from a more fundamental difference between the two pictures. While the Blue Marble reproduces the immediacy of the human eye’s embodied perception, Pale Blue Dot offers a perspective of a fully automated imaging system, which far exceeds the temporality of human perception and is capable of a detailed pacing of information flows. In so doing, it challenges our intuitive and situated understanding of distance, perspective and space. Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 FIG. 3 Pale Blue Dot , June 6, 1990. The Earth appears as a tiny pale blue dot in a photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe. Focusing on what he calls “a war of perception over earth imaging”,17 Russill also investigates the situation in which the iconic Blue Marble was taken. As he explains, none of the three astronauts conducting the Apollo 17 mission ever found themselves in a position to see Earth as depicted on that photograph; they were all confined to cramped cabins that did not allow them to look out of small windows. As a result, the astronaut shot the picture with a camera held at hip-height, not at eye-level. Moreover, all astronaut cameras were not only linked to the automated Earth imaging system, which had been preprogrammed based on previous Earth imaging experience, but they also had standard settings. Therefore, as Russill concludes, “[t]he representation of the earth is a function of the desired technical resolution, and not at all what our eyes would see from the space”.18 Thus, he posits, we should credit Blue Marble to Richard Underwood, Chief of Photography at NASA, rather than one of the Apollo 17 astronauts. For it was Underwood who developed the film and, out of many pictures, made one master image which continues to colonise our imagination as a view of Earth as seen by a human eye. Coming back to Russill’s analysis of how the Blue Marble has reconfigured the way in which humans perceive Earth, Joanna Zylinska approaches the issue Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 from another angle in her book Nonhuman Photography. Rather than contrasting human vision with a machinic one, she positions the human as part of a complex more-than-human assemblage of perception. In doing so, she focuses on how such images of Earth, based on raw digital data from a space camera, was rendered and adapted to subjugate “the nonhuman eye of the space camera to the visual mastery of the human”.19 Offering an impression of immediacy, proximity and visual mastery, the pictures taken from afar quickly constituted Earth as a graspable object; and this sight became “a familiar device for creating an illusion of telluric unity (aka ‘globalization’)”,20 used to raise politico-ethical questions concerning human responsibility for increasingly urgent ecological threats. To substantiate her argument, Zylinska refers to the concept of the masculinist gaze of domination and occupation that Donna Haraway, already in the late 1980s, described as a way of “seeing everything from nowhere”,21 only to replace it by the concept of situated knowledges, which have also proven productive outside of feminist studies. However, the Blue Marble was practically and ideologically taken from space, and not from the nowhere of the masculinist gaze. Therefore, I would rather employ another recently proposed figure, the Overseer, which, in her Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff clearly links to “the geologic gaze and the graze of extraction over bodies, land, and relation”.22 By no means does this replace one type of gaze with another. Whilst still identifying the Overseer with a seeing from nowhere, she shifts emphasis from gender relations to racist and colonial relations which have exerted impact on Western modes of knowledge production and practices of knowing. In so doing, Yusoff conceptualises this figure as the key-protagonist of the Anthropocene. Returning to the origin of geology as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry and a colonial practice that in its politically inspired performance produced normative approaches to both matter/materiality and human subjectivity, Yusoff perceptively points out: “Colonial earth is defined by the spatial perspectivism of the Overseer’s carceral look (since 1492): from the conquistadors’ thirst for gold from the bow of a ship, the surveyors’ technical gaze over landscape and into its depths, the imagined scopic regimes are from the fort, the castle, the skyscraper rather than the view from the undergrounds of the mines and doors of no return”.23 The scopic regime of the patriarchal mastery of nature – treated as a resource, an achievement, and an improvement – can, as I posit, be identified with the Anthropocene. Consequently, the Blue Marble, creating an illusion of telluric unity, becomes an incarnation of “the confident colonial gaze that seizes a geographic imagination of place as resource and field of conquest”.24 There is a reason why I recall the scholarly accounts of how the Blue Marble was made – they expose the ideological framing which continues today. An illusion of telluric unity has not only been propagated by the advocates of so-called Gaian Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 science;25 recently, it has also returned with a vengeance in the increasingly influential discourse of Earth system scientists who once again encourage us to imagine the planet as ‘One World’. For the purposes of the present argument, one example should suffice. In his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty reassesses the concept of the planetary, calling for a necessary differentiation between two often confused concepts – the planet and the globe – as well as three distinct timescales: the history of the planet, the history of life on the planet, and the history of the globe made by the logics of empires, capital and technology. As Chakrabarty emphasises, “the global […] refers to matters that happen within human horizons of time – the multiple horizons of existential, intergenerational, and historical time – though the processes might involve planetary scales of space”.26 Therefore, while the globe as the object of globalisation remains a predominantly anthropocentric and anthropological construction, the planet as an emergent object of human concern and a new historical-philosophical entity decentres the human, demanding planet-centred ways of thinking. Referring to the interdisciplinary field of Earth System Science (ESS), Chakrabarty shows that it creates models of how a planet works as a whole, focusing on and referencing habitability of multicellular life in general. In effect, also the principles of its representation differ from those involved in both a long history of imagining the planet and more recent ways of depicting the globe, also from outer space. Nonetheless, when approached from the perspective of what I would like to call the Anthropo(s)cene, the planet remains envisaged in the universal scale as ‘One World’, abstracted and mastered by experts. Although ESS’s models include information obtained from satellites positioned in space, Chakrabarty declares that because geobiological deep time remains intrinsic to the Earth system of ESS, it “is produced not simply by a physical view of the planet from outside but by reconstituting it into an abstract figure in the imagination with the help of the sciences […], an entity no one ever encounters physically”.27 In other words, because the reconstituted planet cannot be known or sensed directly, what Chakrabarty defines as the planetary not only out-scales the human but also has nothing moral, ethical or normative about it. That is why it allows scientific measurements and approaches to be kept separate from moral-political considerations concerning proposed solutions to the current planetary climate emergency. In his latest book One Planet, Many Worlds, Chakrabarty comes back to the category ‘planet’ and a peculiar challenge it poses to the domain of the political, still often identified with the interests and activities of Western nation-states. He agrees with Tsing in that the planet involves various entanglements. Yet, at the same time, he insists that although the planet is one and ESS posits the existence of a single Earth ‘system’, “[t]here is no one humanity in politics”.28 For this reason, humanity cannot become a source of a unitary political subject, although the intensifying polycrisis calls for Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 “The battle to resolve planetary and geological scales is not a battle to shift scalar focus (to the earth, for instance), but rather to construct a cosmic zoom that articulates the right scalar network, tells an effective story of interscalar (and intrascalar) dynamics, and enables the imagining of new processes in previously devalued regions of the scalar spectrum. Scalar politics is a politics of the network”.46 Importantly, the network which Horton mentions should definitely disrupt the traditional anthropocentric scalar models of a pictorially capturable world. It should not only include scales relevant to other beings and processes but also prioritise a series of scalar negotiations and resolving cuts rather than contiguous space. This does not necessarily entail an investment in the logic of representation, but rather in the database-driven composition of previously unrelated forms, scales, differences and details. Although both Gumbrecht and Horton oppose the anthropocentric logic of globally scaled representation, they do so for different reasons and thus suggest different solutions. While the former focuses on an experiential immediacy of conjured, decentred everyday scenes of the past, the latter prefers “a self-reflexive mediating machine that emphasizes the ineluctable tradeoff between field of view and detectable difference in a drama of resolution”.47 In my reading, Raqs Media Collective’s The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone – despite its richness and diversity of archive materials from the Delhi State Archives and photos from Charles Jencks’ Foundation – comes closer to the self-reflexive mediating machine which Horton looks for in his Cosmic Zoom. Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 FIG. 5 Raqs Media Collective, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone , 2023, 25:05 min, chronogram/film, still. In an interview accompanying the opening of the exhibition 1980 in Parallax at London’s Cosmic House, Raqs Media Collective acknowledges: “What we enjoyed in the making of the film was the use of [an] orthographic mark or parenthesis as the skin, language and texture of the film, which breaks the perspective not for the sake of it but because parallax provides you with that kind of a starting point.”48 Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 18 FIG. 6 Raqs Media Collective, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone , 2023, 25:05 min, chronogram/film, still. Indeed, on the screen, the eponymous Bicyclist is literally followed by parentheses of different size and colour, mostly crimson. Time and again, it is not only words which appear on screen in parentheses, hovering over silhouettes of flying birds or a spotless white ground. The parentheses are also restlessly cornering the sky, bracketing found images, forming a frame and then splitting into two again. They open up to include a duration of time, a picture or fragment thereof, and close to exclude another image. They demonstrate one possible scene within them, close to, or partially cover another picture. However, it is not only the interplay of images and parentheses that shows us what we see is not a literal representation, but rather an intentional composition of various points of view, scales and resolutions. Also, the voice-over, time and again reverberating and overlapping, clearly implies that what is displayed on the screen is but a fraction of what remains hidden. Moreover, to break the homogenising perspective, the video introduces a magnified, flickering and colour-shifting image of a house fly, scouring a chalky field of white flakes and pebbles shortly after the opening explanation of how a parallax functions. The same female voice-over comments on the fly as being a “contaminating witness to things not noticed”,49 thus linking the fly’s function to both parallax and parenthesis. Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 19 FIG. 7 Raqs Media Collective, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone , 2023, 25:05 min, chronogram/film, still. Although neurobiologists and entomologists are not sure what the house fly’s perceptual world looks like, they know it must be very different to ours.50 Flies are not only short-sighted, they also cannot move their eyes to focus on objects or change their focus like humans do, and for this reason, their vision lacks clarity. However, flies process visual information so fast that the world appears to move in a kind of slow-motion from their perspective – or rather, when described from a human point of view. Thanks to that, they are extremely sensitive to motion and react very quickly to threats, like a swatting hand. All these specific features of their environmental perception, together with their characteristic buzzing, were brought into play by Hungarian artist Ferenc Rofusz in his three-minute black-and-white animation The Fly in 1980. The film, showing the world through a fly’s eyes, won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the 53rd Academy Awards. Although the published scenario of The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone mentions this fact in a footnote,51 along with many other events that took place in the year 1980, not a snippet of Rofusz’s animation appears in the video. Unlike The Fly, Raqs Media Collective’s video features the image of the insect but does not show the world through its eyes. However, I will argue that other characteristic features of a fly’s vision have influenced the self-reflexive way in which Raqs Media Collective composed its video essay. The moment the fly appears on the screen in The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, the focus is merely on its “psychedelic compound eyes”. The Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 20 accompanying artist book goes on to refer the reader to a recent scientific study of its “sophisticated vision and neural shortcuts”.52 Both the magnified fly on the screen and the description have a similar effect – they direct our attention to a difference between the way in which humans and flies perceive their surroundings. Foregrounding the compound eyes of the fly, a “contaminating witness to things not noticed” creates a visible link between the eyes, parallax and trans-scalarity which contests the seamless scalar continuity, showing scale in the making, accidental and ever-emerging from/as material conditions and entanglements. Instead of collecting light through a single lens to form a whole image like human eyes, the fly’s compound eyes process visual information much faster because they are made up of thousands of tiny individual lenses. Each lens sends a separate impulse to the brain which combines all signals to form a high-motion, mosaic-like image with a nearly 360-degree view. In comparison to human vision, however, the fly’s has low resolution and limited colour detail. Since each lens is directed in a slightly different direction, the fly perceives every object as a mosaic of visual facets, seeing them all at once. However, the video does not make one image the master of others, like Underwood did when he created the Blue Marble during the Apollo 17 mission. The video does not show the world through the fly’s eyes. Instead, it asks the viewer to focus on the compound eyes themselves, which simultaneously register many slightly different images. Hence, in my reading, the compound projection of our planet, produced by the perceptual apparatus of a nonhuman Other, provides a counter-image to the Blue Marble, as well as a counternarrative to both the discourse of Earth system scientists and the masterful and self-aggrandising visuality of the Anthropocene. A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth To conclude my argument, it is worth rereading Ursula Heise’s book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, which looks at how the eponymous topics have been articulated in artworks which deal with scalar negotiations in a planetary frameworkfrom the late 1960s onwards.53 At the turn of this century, Heise, for two reasons, returned to the well-known Blue Marble. On the one hand, she pointed to various possibilities for zooming in and out of local, regional, and global views that, enabled by diverse imaging techniques, have largely superseded the iconic representation of the planet seen from outer space. On the other hand, however, she wonders whether rootedness in place should remain a necessary component of environmental ethics. For this reason, she argues that we should urgently develop a kind of eco-cosmopolitanism, or ecological world citizenship grounded in a deterritorialised environmental vision. As she emphasises, global connectedness has made it unprecedentedly difficult to experience a place in all its particularity. Moreover, our daily life has been increasingly shaped by structures, processes, and products that originate elsewhere. Therefore, Heise argues, “ecologically oriented thinking has yet to Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 21 come to terms with one of the central insights of current theories of globalization: namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of cultures that are no longer anchored in place”.54 With this aim, she focuses on cultural forms and artworks that propagate ideas of identity and belonging in line with globalist environmental perspectives. In other words, Heise’s book, published in 2008, captures the very moment when a sense of place – which had been a basic prerequisite for environmental awareness and activism since the 1960s – started to give way, in the new century, to a perspective of the entire planet perceived as a shared whole, integrating views and scenarios from different localities. This was possible thanks to the recently developed Google Earth application, which can “display the whole planet as well as the minute details of particular places in such a way that the user can zoom from one to the other and focus on different types of information”.55 At this juncture, Heise refers to Lev Manovich’s concept of database aesthetics, typical of new media art to mean the new aesthetic configuration that “is neither narrative nor metaphorical in its basic structure but instead presents infinitely expandable sets of data with the possibility of establishing different sorts of sets and linkages between them”.56 For Heise, database aesthetics is the primary mode for expressing eco-cosmopolitanism – the imagined communities of both human and nonhuman kind as part of planetary – in new artworks. Almost two decades later, I wonder whether such technological tools and artworks, inspired by Manovich’s database aesthetics, have truly answered a question formulated by Yaakov Jerome Garb in 1990 and quoted in one of Heise’s footnote: “Isn’t the fantasy that we can somehow contain the Earth within our imagination, bind it with a single metaphor, the most mistaken presumption of all? What would it be to live with multiple images of the Earth – fragmented, partial, and local representations that must always be less than the Earth we try to capture with them?”57 In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Heise focuses on how to smoothly combine images of the whole planet with its more partial representations, leaving aside the problem so important to Garb and to myself in the present article – that the satellite view of Earth privileges vision over direct experience of other senses, actual or remembered, as in the case of The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone. From today’s perspective, database aesthetics, which according to Heise should support and express eco-cosmopolitanism, seems to exemplify the illusion of immediacy against which Gumbrecht warned his readers. Despite its digital and interactive nature, this type of aesthetics still remains in the realm of Horton’s pan-scalar humanism because it visibly “tames alterity of different scales by relativizing it, binding unfamiliar scales to the familiar one of the Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 22 human”.58 Contrary to that, Raqs Media Collective’s The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone prioritises a self-reflexive series of scalar negotiations and resolving cuts, rather than contiguous space of zooming in and out within the continuous space of the One World. The video, therefore, not only captures scenes of everyday life in their decentred, sensuously chaotic arrangements as seen from the ground, but also frames them as scenes (rather than patches, as Tsing would have it) from a planetary, more-than-human perspective, aiming to possibly change our relationalities with and to Earth and the cosmos. By the same token, it points towards defining the speculative and trans-scalar Anthropo(s)cene as a “contaminating witness to things not noticed”59 by the Anthropocene. Please cite as follows: Małgorzata Sugiera: “After the ‘Blue Marble’: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, no. 8, Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17771682. This contribution is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND License 4.0 International (Creative Commons, Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives). The reuse of material from other sources may require further authorizations for use by the respective copyright holders. NOTES 1 Mentz 2019, p. 4. 2 Although many alternative names of the Anthropocene have focused on replacing the first part of the term, Jussi Parikka fuses anthrowith obscene to introduce a new notion – the Anthrobscene . This term highlights the geological underpinning of contemporary media culture as well as the obscenities of digital culture and its corporate networks – politically dubious and ethically suspicious. Parikka 2015. 3 See the Cambridge Dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scene (accessed: 10/04/2025). 4 Aït-Touati 2024. 5 Aït-Touati 2020, p. 432. 6 See Descartes 1965. 7 Aït-Touati 2020, p. 435. 8 Ibid., p. 432. 9 See Tsing/Deger/Keleman Saxena/Zhou 2024. 10 Tsing 2016, p. 4. 11 See INSERT #2, edited by Sigrid Adorf and Sønke Gau, in which the editors discuss the ability to react and respond sensually and sensitively under the term senseABILITIES, also referring to the iconic Blue Marble image as a symbol of global perception and connectedness, Adorf/Gau 2022. 12 Russill 2016, pp. 228–250. 13 Brand quoted in ibid., p. 233. 14 Brand quoted in Ibid. 15 Russill 2016, p. 235. 16 Sagan 1994, p. 7. 17 Russill 2016, p. 235. 18 Ibid., p. 245. 19 Zylinska 2017, p. 56. 20 Ibid., p. 53. 21 Haraway 1988, p. 581. 22 Yusoff 2024, p. 18. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 108. 25 See Clarke 2020. 26 Chakrabarty 2021, p. 86. 27 Ibid., p. 79. 28 Chakrabarty 2023, p. 8. 29 Ibid., p. x. 30 Ibid., p. 16. 31 Ibid., p. 103. 32 More Worlds Collective 2025, p. 7. 33 Ibid., p. 5. 34 Raqs Media Collective 2023, p. 1. Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 23 35 Langley 2023. 36 Raqs Media Collective 2023, p. 43. 37 Gumbrecht 1997, p. xi. 38 Ibid., p. 436. 39 Ibid., pp. xi–xii. 40 Ibid., p. xii. 41 See ibid. pp. 349–407. 42 Ibid., p. 425. 43 See Horton 2021. 44 Horton 2021, p. 3. 45 Ibid., p. 11. 46 Ibid., pp. 109–110. 47 Ibid., p. 220. 48 Raqs Media Collective in Steierhoffer 2023. 49 Raqs Media Collective 2023, p. 7. 50 See Drews/Leonhardt/Pirogova/Richter/Schuetzenberger/Braun/Serbe/Borst 2019. 51 See ibid., pp. 7–8. 52 Ibid., p. 7. 53 See Heise 2008. 54 Heise 2008, p. 10. 55 Ibid., p. 67. 56 On Heise’s discussion of Manovich’s database aesthetics see Heise 2008, p. 67; original concept, see Manovich 2001, pp. 212–243. 57 Garb quoted in ibid., p. 212. 58 Horton 2021, p. 3. 59 Raqs Media Collective 2023, p. 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY Sigrid Adorf/Sønke Gau: “Editorial. senseABILITIES – In Search of a Different Narrating in the Anthropocene Discourse.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries , no. 2, 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6772203. Frédérique Aït-Touati: “Arts of Inhabiting: Ancient and New Theatres of the World.” Trans. by Liz Carey Libbrecht. In: Bruno Latour/Peter Weibel (eds.): Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth . Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA: ZKM/Center for Art and Media/The MIT Press, 2020, pp. 432–438. —: Théâtres du monde: Fabriques de la nature en Occident . Paris: La Découverte, 2024. Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. —: One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax . Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2023. Bruce Clarke: Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene . Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. René Descartes: Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology . Trans. by Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Michael S. Drews/Aljoscha Leonhardt/Nadezhda Pirogova/Florian G. Richter/Anna Schuetzenberger/Lukas Braun/Etienne Serbe/Alexander Borst: “Dynamic Signal Compression for Robust Motion Vision in Flies.” In: Current Biology. A Cell Press journal , vol. 30, no. 2, 2019, pp. 209–221. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.035. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time . Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Donna Haraway: “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Feminist Studies , vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599. Ursula K. Heise: Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Zachary Horton: The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Patrick Langley: “Raqs Media Collective’s ‘1980 in Parallax’.” In: e-flux , 18/06/2023, URL: https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/533777/raqs-media-collective-s-1980-in-parallax (accessed: 10/08/2025). Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Steve Mentz: Break Up the Anthropocene . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. More Worlds Collective (Joseph Masco, Tim Choy, Jake Kosek, M. Murphy): Fear of a Dead White Planet . Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2025. Jussi Parikka: The Anthrobscene . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Raqs Media Collective: The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone , London: Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, 2023, URL: https://works.raqsmediacollective.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Bicyclist-who-Fel l-into-a-Time-Cone.pdf (accessed: 20/10/2025). Chris Russill: “Earth Imaging: Photograph, Pixel, Program.” In: Stephen Rust/Salma Monani/Sean Cubitt (eds.): Ecomedia: Key Issues . London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 228–250. Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot . New York: Random House, 1994. Eszter Steierhoffer: “Raqs Media Collective Interview: 1980 in Parallax.” In: Jencks Foundation , 2023, URL: https://www.jencksfoundation.org/explore/text/raqs-media-collective-interview-1980-in- Małgorzata Sugiera After the “Blue Marble”: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 24 parallax (accessed: 10/08/2025). Anna Tsing: “Earth Stalked by Man.” In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology , vol. 34, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2016.340102. Anna Tsing/Jennifer Deger/Alder Keleman Saxena/Feifei Zhou: Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature . Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. Kathryn Yusoff: Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race . Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2024. Joanna Zylinska: Nonhuman Photography . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. CREDITS Fig. 1: © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo: Eugene A. Cerman, Ronald E. Evans, Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt. JSTOR. Fig. 2: © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo: William A. Anders. JSTOR. Fig. 3: © NASA Visible Earth Catalog. Fig. 4: Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective. AUTHOR Małgorzata Sugiera is a full professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she is Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the College for Social Science and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr in Essen. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, environmental and decolonial studies, particularly in the context of the history of science. She has published several single-authored books in Polish and co-edited several books in English and in German, most recently Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics (Routledge 2022) and Alter(ed) Bodies: Beyond Biopolitics (Brill/V7R unipress 2025).