EYES ON EARTH FROM SPACE - 1986

The Pacific Design Center (PDC) commissioned Eyes on Earth From Space for its tenth annual WESTWEEK conference, titled “Art/Technology/Design.”

The final product was a zoom that took the audience from the view seen by a weather satellite orbiting 22,000-miles above Earth, into a winking “target” constructed in West Hollywood using Van Sant’s signature mirror stations, and ending at the eye of 4-year-old Ryan Van Sant.

Eyes on Earth From Space revisited Powers of 10, the Eames Studio’s 1968 film about relative scale, but it did so in real-time. Van Sant’s zoom was made using 100-still images that were shot at half-hour intervals over the first two days of WESTWEEK by GOES and LANDSAT satellites, U2 reconnaissance planes, commercial aerial photography, and a handheld camera. They were processed and edited overnight for screening at a WESTWEEK panel with JPL’s Dr. Al Hibbs, Caltech’s Dr. Richard Feynman, artist June Wayne, and Stanford University’s Dr. Paul Ehrlich.

Evidencing a less explicitly environmentalist agenda than would soon characterize his work,Van Sant “hoped this event would allow us to experience the relationship in scale between our planet and ourselves.” [1] In contrast, population scientist Paul Ehrlich noted that Earth From Space forced viewers to relate to the finite nature of the global environment. “The biosphere inherited by man is rapidly being depleted,” he warned. “The depletion of non-renewable resources such as soil and water is visible from space and can be measured.” [2]