Bull.Miletic:
Zoom Blue Dot (1990-2018)

This project is constructed as a kinetic two-channel video installation where a custom-made robot with two video projectors, facing opposite directions, slowly traverses a darkened exhibition space in a curved trajectory. The continuous movement causes the projections to continuously shrink and expand across the gallery environment, reflecting and deforming the architectural boundaries. The key focus of Zoom Blue Dot is the current mediatized representation of Earth as a scalable interface, facilitated through a combination of remote sensing technologies and data analyses software.

This project centers on how the composite mediation of Earth is inextricably tied up in multiple ways with the notion of the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems. Today, the aerial view is in motion, not only through the physical attachment of cameras to mobile machines but most prominently in the way these technological mediations are distributed and networked between billions of portable electronic devices, merging news feeds and entertainment with intelligence operations.

Synne Tollerud Bull (b. 1973) and Dragan Miletic (b. 1970) have earned their MFA at San Francisco Art Institute and have been working together as Bull.Miletic since 2000. Bull has also MA from University of Oslo. Zoom Blue Dot is a part of Aerial View in Motion, a four-year artistic research project funded by Media Aesthetics, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The exhibition was generously supported by Arts Council Norway, Arts Research Center and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society at University of California, Berkeley. The project was realized during a semester-long Arts + Science Residency at University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with Holly L. Aaron at the Molecular Imaging Center, Danielle Jorgens at the Electron Microscopy Lab, Vasfi Burak Ozdol at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Christopher Myers at CITRIS Invention Lab.