Limitless Connotation

the Great Eye of Sauron


After reading Lisa Parks’s chapter on “Satellite Panoramas,” which focused heavily on the Hubble Telescope and discourses surrounding it, a class discussion of the text ensued. During this discussion, William Jennings, a classmate of mine, had an excellent point. He said “all satellite images are pure connotation.” Since our class examined Barthes’s “The photographic message,” connotation and denotation have been the subjects of analysis and William had excellently and eloquently brought that knowledge into our discussion of Park’s work. But what Parks’s writing omits is not only images from distant space are subject to these varied connotations, but really any image that appears “alien” to the audience could be subject to a seemingly endless range of connotations personal to that individual.

While discussing Hubble telescope images, Parks claims, “These [satellite] panoramas are not tranquil vistas of outer space; rather, they are contested discursive terrains that are activated as the conventions of astronomical observation, digital imaging, broadcasting, and filmmaking are combined and brought to bear in their production, circulation, and interpretation.” These images are not just merely pictures from space but rather images that spawn various connotations and discourses among humans here on Earth. They are not simple snap shots of the far reaches of space, but an amalgamation of a telescopic image married with media techniques such as digital effects enhancement and broadcasting promotion. What we see through the television are rendered images, prepared for human eyes by scientists, and then re-prepared by television producers and the audience is left to decode and make sense of these images. So much goes into the preparation, for example the enhancing of the thermal part of the images so the human eye can witness gamma ray bursts that customarily we wouldn’t be able to see.

As it is for obscure satellite photos, the same could be asserted for images gathered from the darkest depths of Earth’s oceans or down inside a volcano or the bottom of an ant hill buried in a tropical jungle to even images carefully gathered during a routine colonoscopy. Any one of these images being unfamiliar to a viewer, seeming as alien as the dark reaches of the universe, would then be subjected to the vast associations in that persons mind. Just as the picture included in this blog entry of a ring of cosmic dust around star Fomalhaut can appear to be an image from the film Lord of the Rings. Park’s says “although Hubble images document outer space phenomena they can only be interpreted at all in relation to what we more intimately know, that is histories, societies, and cultures on Earth.”

What appears to one audience member as a dark corner of space may look like an image of Jesus Christ illuminating from starlight. Occasionally humans can see what they want. Humans insist images of the Virgin Mary have appeared under highway overpasses, clouds, fireworks displays, and in even in grilled cheese sandwiches. Some audience members can look at satellite images and see what might be the beginning of human time, while others look at it and see the end of human time. Amateur speculation could be as endless as the human brain’s capacity for imagination. Some images can appear so foreign to an audience, literally and figuratively, it becomes rather easy to find limitless connotations within them. We see them and make sense of them with our human eyes and in our Earthly mind sets.


-Author Does Not Exist