Uncle Roger (1986)
It’s 1969. A young woman in Boulder, Colorado is working for an engineering firm that’s building the Orbiting Solar Observatory satellites, the world’s first space telescopes. She’s there to help computerize the firm’s databases, not build satellites, but can’t help stopping often by the viewing platform overlooking the clean room to watch this glorious piece of hardware be assembled. “People entered in lab coats,” she reminisced later: “the thing was gold, it was shining, it was huge, it was intricate. It was — beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.” And yet at the same time, another part of her was sad. Because outside of working hours, she was also an artist, and had struggled like all artists for even the smallest scraps of funding: fifty dollars for materials here, a week-long residency there. Looking at the multi-million dollar satellite, the culmination of a decade of expensive work, she realized no artist would ever have the budget to make something so incredible.
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But then a different thought struck her. “Okay, an artist cannot create that,” she remembers thinking. “I cannot create an Orbiting Solar Observatory. …But an artist could use technology.”
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