NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA, 1999

Aerogel is an ultralight nanoporous material: a gel in which the liquid element is replaced with gas. This translucent, extremely low-density substance has the lowest-known heat conductivity in a solid and is used as insulation in space exploration.

The image is excerpted from Armin Linke’s publication The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen (Spector Books 2017) for which Linke invited scientists and theoreticians to examine his picture archive. Ariella Azoulay, Franco Farinelli, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Mark Wigley, and Jan Zalasiewicz made a selection of Linke’s images and in the process opened up his photos to a variety of different readings including the following for the image chosen for this project:

“In his Communist Manifesto, Marx refers to Goethe’s Faust and writes that modernity is the time in which all that is solid is transformed and vanishes into thin air; it is the time of what Schumpeter has called creative destruction. Here, the immaterial par excellence—that is to say, air —becomes something material and corporeal. Postmodernity becomes the exact opposite of modernity.” – Franco Farinelli