You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

2010
You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

An installation with handmade kinetic projection devices that cast moving archival satellite photographs onto the floor below. Each device hangs from the ceiling and rotates transparent strips of remote sensed images of "Cold War spaces" on acetate in front of an LED light source. They are constructed with found materials like camera lenses and consumer by-products in order to reference the fleet of impotent surveillance satellites that orbit the earth while their light-sensitive payloads have been spent and dropped long ago.

Video by Asa Gauen
You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore
You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore at AC Direct

Film strips

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore, strip, Moscow 1962
You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

Declassified Satellite Imagery

Approximately 880,000 photographic images were taken between 1959 and 1972 by the United States. These images were primarily collected by the CORONA satellite series, but the dataset also includes photos taken from the ARGON and LANYARD satellites. The original film and technical mission-related documents are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

You Never Close Your Eyes AnymoreYou Never Close Your Eyes Anymore, strips, Moscow
You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore, strips, North KoreaYou Never Close Your Eyes Anymore, strips, Vietnam

Schematic

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

Exhibitions

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore was represented recently in Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice published by Routledge (2010).