No one could accuse Donald Pettit of idling during his downtime aboard the International Space Station. The NASA astronaut has spent six months in orbit, as part of three space missions, and during that time he shot a half a million photographs of our little blue dot.
He featured dozens of them Wednesday night at “The View From Above,” his immersive presentation at Festival of the Arts Boca. Opening with a yearning poetry of the cosmos—“Space is my mistress, and she beckons my return”—Pettit placed audiences aboard the ISS’s cupola, with its eight cameras and seven windows. This is where Pettit shot the miraculous images of Earth that constituted the lecture’s transfixing, transportive “wow” factor.
We saw Mount Everest and Great Salt Lake, New Orleans and the Florida Keys, a churning hurricane and the vast Arctic, all from the aerial comfort of the ISS. Through tricks of exposure, lightning appeared as a cluster of white splotches across a kinetic canvas of neon. The Bahamas resembled a neon green flower in bloom; Pettit referred to the Ganges River, shown in infrared, as his “orbital Matisse.” He showed us videos as well as still images. Because I’m a cinephile, Pettit’s work conjured both the psychedelic Star Gate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the pioneering time-lapse photography in “Koyaanisqatsi.” Pettit is a techno geek when it comes to photography as well as space travel, and for this, we’re all grateful.
Pettit spoke extemporaneously for an hour, then graciously answered questions from audience members, including from children younger than 8. One spectator asked a question about how the current geopolitical climate, with the international isolation of Russia, would affect space travel, in which Americans and Russian cosmonauts have long worked side by side. Pettit gave a genuine but pat answer—“When you’re in space, there are no international boundaries”—but I would have liked a more specific consideration of the ramifications of our current moment.
Otherwise, it was a magical night at Festival of the Arts, an exhilarating expression of Pettit’s belief that “art is an inevitable consequence of being human, even in space.”
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