‘The Blue Marble’ was the name given to the iconic photograph of the Earth taken on 7 December 1972 some 33,000 kilometres from the planet’s surface. The first colour image of the Earth as a planet, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on their journey to the Moon, has become one of the most reproduced images in cultural history. The image’s dramatic depiction of the fragility and vulnerability of the Earth and its isolation in the vastness of space became a symbol of environmentalism and the green movement’s concern for our planet in the 1970s.

The video evokes this vision but leaves the viewer uncertain whether it is Planet Earth and the ever-changing surface of its atmosphere or it is a mysterious metaphor for any planet in the universe threatened by mankind.

A fragment of the series of ten different glass spheres – the basis of the digital animation – can be viewed upstairs in space no. 26.

Barnabás Bencsik