Atmospheres, 2015

In 2014, Devasher collected recordings of the sky at the Gauribidanur Radio Telescope Array near Bengaluru. The camera captured a mirrored sky, a sphere of blue, with shifting frames of sky and cloud, crisscrossed by thin black lines, the beautiful and strange decametre wave radio telescope, or framed by the silver radio heliographs at the observatory. The footage material immediately recalled the iconic “blue marble” photograph, an image of Earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon on December 7, 1972. So much a part of our lives now, we perhaps don’t realize how significant that first view of Earth from outer space was. It transformed our consciousness and made us think about the Earth’s ecosystem as a single planetary unit. A response to the distance we sometimes feel toward or project onto the planet, Atmospheres offers an alternate view of the “blue marble” from our perspective on Earth.