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In late 1939, Harvard astrophysicist David Menzel, undertook a new project to detect the solar corona, the ring of energy around the sun until then only visible to the naked eye during full eclipses, using a newly developed type of astronomical instrument: a coronagraph. In 1940, Menzel assigned graduate student Walter Orr Roberts, newly married and a Boston-native, to drive over two thousand miles cross-country to establish and oversee an astronomical observatory atop the Continental Divide at the highest settled elevation in the United States. The mining company that had established the settlement agreed to Menzel’s request that it host the new observatory, providing the site, access to utilities, as well as collaboration on observatory, darkroom and cabin design and construction. Roberts set off with his wife in summer of 1940, a “Honeymoon is the Clouds” as a small-town newspaper society page called it. Little did they know at the time, but the two would spend most of the coming decade at Climax.
Once assembled, the Climax High Altitude Observatory provided a lens—literally, a window—whose aim was to be pointed high into the sky. With Roberts at the helm, this coronagraph produced day-after-day’s photographic and filmic documentation. This in turn enabled analysis of the intriguing movements of the solar corona: flares, prominences, and spicules and other forms of the explosive energy fields emanating from and surrounding the sun. As the astronomer at Climax looked up higher and higher, engaging ever more deeply in the relationship between earth and sun, and sharing his findings across the nation, the mining company that hosted the observatory—providing land, recreational activities, road maintenance and even an obstetrician—dug itself ever deeper into the ground.
“The Observatory at Climax: Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” examines the nexus of industrial mining and solar astrophysics, excavating the space—literal and figurative, aesthetic and technological—of the Climax High Altitude Observatory. Built on the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet above sea level, on and with the support of the Climax Molybdenum Company, then the world’s largest and deepest underground mining operation in 1940, Climax housed a massive instrument that simulated a solar eclipse, as well as a darkroom for developing solar films and photographs. Both the information abstracted from the solar imagery, and the metals extracted from the tunnels beneath, would come to have profound strategic importance to a World War fought thousands of miles away. Critical inquiry into the site provides the aesthetic, philosophical and creative center for a multi-modal exploration of extraction and abstraction at the limits of human sight, and of the poetics and politics of foresight.
Hanna Rose Shell is Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for the Media Arts, as well as Associate Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She is jointly appointed in both the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts. Shell is also a core faculty member of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of History, the Center of the American West, and the Program in Intermedia, Writing, and Performance [IAWP] in the College of Media, Communication, and Information. (https://www.colorado.edu/cinemastudies/hanna-rose-shell)