Perseverance Amidst the Regolith

Silkscreen and aluminum leaf on sekishu kozo paper, 100 inches wide by 64 inches tall, 1 of 2. Photo by Jeffu Warmouth.

The 20 prints in this grid were taken by the Perseverance roverbot on Mars on August 14, 2022, which is my birthday. Perseverance has 2 AI systems on board, which help it decide when to capture images and when and where to dig for samples. This piece represents an attempt to collaborate with an artificially intelligent being on an alien planet. I have given Perseverance some amount of agency by preserving the order in which the photographs were taken (read from left to right), and the composition of each image. The use of aluminum leaf calls attention to the body of Perseverance and signals that some of these images could, in a sense, be read as self-portraits.

Individual Perseverance Prints 1-20 (click to view larger):

From Fleurons to Roverbots (excerpt from Chapter 4):

The Perseverance is an example of machine learning: an alien robot on Mars with two AI systems incorporated into a metallic body. That body is literally projected into space by human technology, technology developed by a species currently at risk of making their own planet uninhabitable in a few generations time. This matter of “artificial intelligence” is a construct and a projection in and of itself. Beings evolved on Earth develop technologies made of materials found on Earth, rendering the distinctions between artificial and natural rather useless for our purposes.

Just as with the printing press, we cannot help but put ourselves into that which we create, and those selves are complex, convoluted, sometimes brilliant, often flawed. There is every reason to believe that the things we carried, the printing press, misogyny, a certain derision for and disregard of the Earth, are now embodied in the Perseverance as we project the hopes and desires of some of our species, at least, outward into the solar system.

These entanglements are what happens when an alien robot is projected, literally flown to and embedded in the regolith of Mars, creating a fold, a knot in the space-time continuum. As Perseverance makes decisions about when and where to take photographs that incorporate images of its aluminum body, it transmits these images back to Earth where they are read by computers, interpreted by software, and placed on the NASA website for public consumption. This, too, is a kind of quipu, a nexus of information, an entanglement of binary streams of data.

In a sequence of twenty silkscreen prints with aluminum leaf on kozo paper, I use materials to accentuate the foreign quality of the Perseverance rover on the landscape of Mars. The Perseverance is largely made of aluminum, including its six wheels. Each print in the sequence represents a moment in time. Taken together it represents a time-based grid of images as the robot arm moves through space and clicks a shutter. In this sense, the robot is a camera, a complex self-driven camera that moves through an alien landscape gathering digitally recorded memories of light waves as they move through a thin atmosphere and bounce off of the sand, the rocks, and the Perseverance itself.

In an oddly prescient return to seventeenth century convention, the naming of the Perseverance speaks to Puritan customs of naming children after virtues like Purity, Chastity, and Obedience. It is an aspirational way of naming children, and the Perseverance is after all a child of Earth. Our aspiration is for it to persevere on an alien planet, opening gateways for further exploration, for cartographic strategies of empire involving photography and mapping, and for future colonization.