A Demon that Slips into Your Telescopes while You’re Dead Tired and Blocks the Light

4K, 54 min, 2019 This video essay mixes the language of documentary with that of speculative fiction in order primarily to analyze the construction of the astronomical image and scientific knowledge. It consists of interviews with experts Dr. Jackie Faherty (Senior Scientist, Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History), Dr. Lisa Messeri (Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Yale University) and Dr. Steve B. Howell (Chief, Space Science and Astrobiology Division, NASA Ames Research Center), which are pieced together with archive aerial photos, images taken by drones by Bayyina Black and a tale of speculative fiction by Janani Balasubramanian. In these original scenes, actors Bex Kwan, Sophia Mak, Kelly Haran and Balasubramanian himself perform conversations with a brown dwarf, between various astronomical phenomena, and between a scientist and the data she is studying. It is a work approached from the horizontality between human and non-human agents (brown dwarfs, telescopes, data, scientific) that works through ideas around new materialism and posthumanism. Dr. Jackie Faherty analyzes brown dwarfs and their movements. They are not strictly stars or planets, but something intermediate, indefinite, and invisible to the human eye. We could say that they have a flexible and constantly shifting identity. Science is the product of human labor. Everything we know about the planets is a built construct. Dr. Lisa Messeri studies people whose work is science and technology, and how what they create impacts on our way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Her concept of “planetary imagination” is a way of addressing what is not conveyed in scientific papers: the intangible ways in which scientists understand planets, what other researchers might call “a structure of feeling.” In the last scene, the scientist converses with her data: — Scientist: Knowing things like this expands our universe but at the same time makes it smaller; things seem more knowable and more intimate. — Data: It pleases me to be a pathway to a more intimate universe. CREDITS: Director and screenwriter: Itziar Barrio Speculative fiction writer: Janani Balasubramanian Brown Dwarf: Sophia Mak Star and Wise 0855 water-ice: Bex Kwan Data: Janani Balasubramanian Scientist: Kelly Haran Astronomers: Dr. Jacky Faherty, Senior Scientist and Senior Education Manager, Department of Astrophysics and the Department of Education, American Museum of Natural History Dr. Steve B. Howell. Chief, Space Science & Astrobiology Division. NASA, Ames Research Center Anthropologist: Lisa R. Messeri, PhD Professor of sociocultural anthropology, Drone operator: Bayyina Black Cinematography: Ruben Collado, Peter Fuhrman, Chelsea Knight and Itziar Barrio Production assistants: Sarah Anderson, Laura Brown, Olivia Divecchia, Zac Spears Make up artist and stylist: Tora López Editors: Itziar Barrio, Maria Abad Color and audio correction: Maria Abad Animations: Myles Santifer Original music: Keith Milgaten Audio Mixer: Matthew Jinks Scientific Advisors: Dr. Georgina Berrozpe, Dr. Mandë Holford Translations: Lucia Martínez Texts fragments from: For Space, Doreen Massey, SAGE Publications LTD, 2005 A Global Sense Of Place, Doreen Massey, Marxism Today, 1991 Archives: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Kitt Peak National Observatory NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Archives and Records Administration Creative Commons Filmed at: Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Schuk Toak District on the Tohono O’odham Nation/National Optical Astronomy Observatory/ Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy/ National Science Foundation, Arizona American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY CSV, The Clemente Cultural Center, New York City, NY Mountain State Park, New Jersey Different locations, Brooklyn, New York Fine Line Farm, Maine Different locations, Vermont Skowhegan, Maine La Caverna Bar, New York City, NY Produced by BBVA Foundation, MULTIVERSO Fellowship 2017 Many thanks: Dr. Lori Allen, Sarah Anderson, Bayyina Black, Benny (La Caverna), Georgina Berrozpe, Joanne Flores, Lia Gangitano, Steve B. Howell, Chelsea Knight, Julia Morandeira, Dr. Stephen M. Pompea, Jessica Rose, Robert Sparks, La TEA Theater and Alexis Wilkinson