The First Man on the Moon

After the talk, I sat down at my desk at home. I felt dissatisfied, but my thoughts were rushing too fast to focus on any one of them. Maybe it was due to my own general lack of concentration, or a suppressed, unarticulated disinterest in really analyzing any of it. Or maybe I just didn’t have the courage to face what was uncomfortable. I sat there not because I wanted to be there, but out of a deeply ingrained habit tied to that particular place in the apartment. Driven by the same undead sort of motivation or maybe simply out of distraction I looked at my phone, which offered me a recap of photos. Awkwardly forced memories no one had asked for, yet ones that had—if we’re honest—been captured precisely for the purpose of later looking back at them. Mixed in with screenshots of memes, gameplays, and various artworks whose creators I had intended and forgot to look up later, there were photos from a road trip I’d taken alone, without my partner. A selfie with a coastal view. Very strange to see that again from the distance of both space and time. Placing yourself in front of a view of the world and trying to capture a completely unsharable, felt moment in a tightly composed image, as proof that one was truly there. The artificiality of it amused me with a kind of self-loathing irony. Everything felt strangely harmonized, as if all the other things weighing on the mind simply didn’t exist. Probably as a form of comfort for the person the image was meant for, assuming they too felt the same crushing sense of being overwhelmed by it all. And out of this supposed compassion, maybe also as comfort for oneself. We are quite literally experiencing the end of our society while trying to maintain an image that now exists only in staged form. The view of the ocean is such an image. It is beautiful and calming, but in its totality too complex to grasp, especially in light of its drastic transformation through human interference, which is too vast, too slow, and too widely spread across time and space to register with our senses. Its shape and scale remain seemingly the same. It escapes us not because it lacks impact, but because it unfolds beyond the scope of human experience. What we see is only the section nearest, the rest extending far beyond our comprehension. The horizon literally marks the boundary of what is visible, not to mention the vastness extending outside the frame. Looking out at the sea connects us to archaic dreams, as old as the beginning of civilization. Just as sentimental as gazing at the stars. Often accompanied by a moment of deceleration, both of these embarrassing reflections on ourselves and the world tend to reveal personal and planetary boundaries. They also reveal our inability to think of ourselves in a collective or as a shared form of being, even though such tropes are often presented as universal iconography or sentiment. The gaze remains highly subjective and, especially since modernity and the rise of (digital) image-making tools, marked by a graceless need for individual self-expression. I suddenly had to think of sci-fi films in which the view from space exposes our (cosmological) insignificance and where, to save ourselves from an external threat (e.g., aliens), we present images of human closeness and culture on earth as proof that maybe we are worth preserving after all. In most examples that come to mind, these images are also subjective: individual experiences that are made to stand in for something universal; entirely romanticized and even colonialist ideas of significance. Creating (artificial) meaning intending to leave a mark, serving as motivation not to give up. Perhaps they also contain a self-pitying admission of our own helplessness… this kind of sentimentality is striking precisely because it is so artificial. Through that artificiality, we constitute ourselves as individuals. Like the first landscape paintings, which sought to prove the virtuosity of the artist more than doing justice to reality; or the Voyager records, which try to compress all of humanity into a small selection of images and sounds. I noticed how depictions of landscape, of self-assertion within the world, usually attempt to erase signs of human interference and present the coastline as untouched, with my posing face in the foreground. The first man on the moon. In the end, my picture of the sea worked no differently than the images I had screenshotted. Just another composed image, shaped by subjective choices. Simulations which are meant to reflect reality but express more the imagination of their authors.

Then Sofia rang the doorbell and I had to put my phone away.

Originally published on occasion of Sofia Defino Leiby's solo exhibition High Noon at the Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg, 2025.