Lookback

2004

On 9 March 2004, NASA released the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the universe yet taken. Hubble had been pointed at a patch of sky that looked almost empty from Earth, and found it crowded with galaxies, some seen as they were less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Many may no longer exist. That same year, NASA cancelled the mission meant to keep Hubble running.

Lookback rebuilds the image from 48 pop-up windows on a Windows XP computer running Internet Explorer 6. They open one by one until the deep field fills the screen, cut into panes by blue title bars. Close a window and that piece of sky is gone, revealing the desktop behind: the same patch as seen from the ground, dark and nearly empty. Nothing brings it back except starting again.

The work is about how much of what we see depends on the machines that let us see it. The sky didn’t change in 2004. An instrument was pointed at it long enough. Remove the instrument and the sky goes back to empty. Here, the pop-up, the web’s most hated interruption, carries one of its most extraordinary images, and the reflex of swatting it away erases the universe piece by piece.

In August 2004, Windows XP Service Pack 2 added a pop-up blocker. On an updated machine, the windows never open, and the screen stays dark. Like the light it shows, the work now reaches us from something that’s gone.

Image: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team.