Otherworlds: Michael Benson
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Biography
MICHAEL BENSON (b 1962)
Michael Benson's work focuses on the intersection of art and science. An artist, writer and filmmaker, Benson has staged a series of large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography in the US and internationally. Benson's recent work of composite photographs explores the corporeality of the real world that is hidden from the human eye.
A major museum show, Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System, at London’s Natural History Museum took place in 2016, featuring new music composed by Brian Eno, and travelled to the Vienna and Luxembourg Natural History Museums. A 7-room, 150-print retrospective, Beyond, was staged from 2010-2011 at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Benson used a scanning electron microscope at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for Nanocosmos. He was a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab.
Benson's book Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, (2014) received front-page coverage in The New York Times and was a finalist for the Science and Technology award at the 2015 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Benson has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Rolling Stone. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece was published in 2018.
Michael Benson is also an award-winning filmmaker, with work that straddles the line between fiction and documentary film practice. In 2008-10, Benson worked with director Terrence Malick to help produce space and cosmology sequences for Malick's film Tree of Life, which drew in part from Benson's book and exhibition projects. The film won the Palm d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
MICHAEL BENSON (b 1962)
Michael Benson's work focuses on the intersection of art and science. An artist, writer and filmmaker, Benson has staged a series of large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography in the US and internationally. Benson's recent work of composite photographs explores the corporeality of the real world that is hidden from the human eye.
A major museum show, Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System, at London’s Natural History Museum took place in 2016, featuring new music composed by Brian Eno, and travelled to the Vienna and Luxembourg Natural History Museums. A 7-room, 150-print retrospective, Beyond, was staged from 2010-2011 at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Benson used a scanning electron microscope at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for Nanocosmos. He was a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab.
Benson's book Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, (2014) received front-page coverage in The New York Times and was a finalist for the Science and Technology award at the 2015 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Benson has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Rolling Stone. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece was published in 2018.
Michael Benson is also an award-winning filmmaker, with work that straddles the line between fiction and documentary film practice. In 2008-10, Benson worked with director Terrence Malick to help produce space and cosmology sequences for Malick's film Tree of Life, which drew in part from Benson's book and exhibition projects. The film won the Palm d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Michael Benson's work focuses on the intersection of art and science. An artist, writer and filmmaker, in the last decade Benson has staged a series of large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography in the US and internationally. Benson's recent work of composite photographs explores the corporeality of the real world that is hidden from the human eye.
A major museum show, Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System, at London’s Natural History Museum took place in 2016, featuring new music composed by Brian Eno, and travelled to the Vienna and Luxembourg Natural History Museums. A 7-room, 150-print retrospective, Beyond, was staged from 2010-2011 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
Benson used a scanning electron microscope at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NYC and the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for his Nanocosmos series. He was a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab.
Benson's book Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, (2014) received front-page coverage in The New York Times and was a finalist for the Science and Technology award at the 2015 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Benson has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Rolling Stone. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. (This link opens in a new tab). was published in 2018.
Michael Benson is also an award-winning filmmaker, with work that straddles the line between fiction and documentary film practice. In 2008-10, Benson worked with director Terrence Malick to help produce space and cosmology sequences for Malick's film Tree of Life, which drew in part from Benson's book and exhibition projects. The film won the Palm d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Nanocosmos
In Nanocosomos Michael Benson investigates sublime topographies at tiny scales by utilising the scanning electron microscope (SEM) at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada. The SEM apparatus allows Benson to examine exceedingly small single-celled organisms. These include the study of radiolarians and diatoms; flowering plants from tropical and temperate regions; and insects and other organisms.
Nanocosmos, 2024
Planetary Works
Benson takes raw data from planetary science archives and processes it, editing, compositing, and then ‘tiling’ individual spacecraft frames, producing seamless large-format digital C prints of landscapes currently beyond direct human experience.
