"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!"
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nightfall
[after Asimov and Emerson]
In Ala Ebtekar’s 'Nightfall' series, the book pages from Asimov’s 'Nightfall' have been treated with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype), and exposed by the night sky — left from dusk to dawn.
'Nightfall' is a 1941 science fiction novelette by American writer Isaac Asimov about the coming of darkness to the people of a planet ordinarily illuminated by sunlight at all times. Once every 2,000 years, an eclipse brought darkness to the planet, which in turn revealed a sky filled with stars. In witnessing this, and realizing their insignificance amidst the vast universe, the planet’s inhabitants went mad…
Asimov’s 'Nightfall' is a response to a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature' essay (1836):
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!
Just a couple years after Emerson writes and publishes his 'Nature' essay (1836), astronomer John Herschel—noted for coining the term 'photography'—invented the cyanotype process (in 1839). The sun, is often the source of uv-light used in the cyanotype process, but here Ebtekar uses the uv-light emitted from the stars for the exposure of these works. Resulting in the works being birthed by the light of the night sky.
