The making of Alice

On 19 October 1863 an unknown mathematician, Charles L. Dodgson, was introduced to the publisher Alexander Macmillan in Oxford by Thomas Combe, director of the Clarendon Press and printer to Oxford University. Macmillan’s publishing business, established with his brother in 1843, was growing. He had built a reputation among scholars and authors as a leading academic publisher in fields such as mathematics and geology.

Dodgson, a master and tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, was friends with the Christ Church dean Henry George Liddell. On 4 July 1862 Dodgson, his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth and Liddell’s eldest daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith, rowed up the Thames to Godstow — the “golden afternoon” when Dodgson responded to Alice’s pleas for a story with the rudiments of what would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The first version was a handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Underground, which Dodgson presented to Alice in 1864. The final book would be published by Macmillan under Dodgson’s pen name, Lewis Carroll.

So, intertwined with the story of Carroll’s intrepid heroine Alice is the story of another remarkable journey — the long alliance of a brilliant author and enabling publisher who together created a world tale. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has never been out of print with Macmillan since 1865, and has been translated into more than 170 languages.Macmillan had published Charles Kingsley’s children’s novel The Water Babies in 1863 to contemporary acclaim. Realising the potential of Carroll’s tale, he agreed to take it on a commission basis: Carroll paid for the printing and marketing, while Macmillan was paid a set commission on sales. Macmillan went on to publish all of Carroll’s books, as well as many of his works written under his own name, on mathematics, geometry and logic (as well as Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Method of Assigning Prizes, with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method).

A deep bond

Carroll and Macmillan had a rare mutual respect, love of literature, and interest in education, new technologies, innovation and scientific enquiry. (A rich source for the depth of this relationship is the volumes of their outgoing correspondence in the Macmillan archive at the British Library.) The writer did not attend Macmillan’s famous “Tobacco Parliaments”, where a scientific magazine, which became Nature, was mooted. He preferred to keep his identity secret, but regularly visited Macmillan and his family and sent them puzzle books to try out before publication.

The relationship between the two men was not without some tension, however. Carroll took a great interest in the printing, design and production of his books, discussing all aspects of the process with Macmillan. His eye for beauty, order and perfection and his expertise in the then intricate, difficult technology of photography drew him to such technicalities. This could backfire. He frequently delayed publication because he was unhappy with the quality of production (or instructing the printers to let the paper dry for long enough before binding). In 1878, he insisted that slips should be inserted into copies of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There after observing that both the Kings had vanished from the chess-diagram in the front of the book.

Carroll’s meticulous instructions extended to securing parcels: a diagram showing how the string was to be knotted hung in the Macmillan post-room for many years. His careful analysis of accounts for his books, in particular the Alice volumes, caused him to question booksellers’ profits – a concern shared by Alexander and later addressed by his nephew, Frederick Macmillan, leading to the Net Book Agreement of 1899.

A technological tale

At the start of Alice’s Adventures, Alice wonders, “what is the use of a book…without pictures or conversations?” Up to this time, children’s books were sparsely illustrated. The creative Carroll — ever interested in visual impact, particularly on his young readers — realised their importance in storytelling, however, and asked artist John Tenniel, cartoonist at the satirical magazine Punch, to illustrate the book.

These classic drawings have become as well known as the story. Beautifully capturing Alice and the characters in Wonderland and the looking-glass world, they are cleverly incorporated into the text through innovative positioning on the page.

Macmillan suggested their use — ultimately, sound advice from one who could not have foreseen how many copies would eventually be printed. The electros wore out after several thousand printings, after which they were melted down and recast.Tenniel first made pencil drawings, then created a tracing from which the main features were transferred in reverse to a woodblock; the drawing was finished on the block, which was then sent to be engraved by the Dalziel brothers, George and Edward. The leading Victorian commercial wood engravers, the Dalziels also worked with artistic luminaries of the day, including pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones. Printing was not done from the blocks; more durable copper electrotypes (electrons) were cast to save the wood.

A set of electrodes was held by the printer Richard Clay, who continued to print from them until the introduction of letterpress in the 1960s. A spare set is still held in the Macmillan archive, including an electro for the ‘Mouse’s Tale’. This section of text had to be treated like an illustration; it was too tricky to set, being narrow and serpentine like a tail. (For more on this, see The Complete Alice.)

After Carroll’s death, the woodblocks were handed over by his estate to Macmillan. In 1932, they were displayed at the Lewis Carroll Centenary exhibition in London, after which they were thought to have been moved to a museum or library.

However, in October 1984 Macmillan’s company secretary was called to the National Westminster Bank to open several metal trunks that had lain in its Covent Garden vault for years. To his amazement, he found the woodblocks, stored there in almost perfect conditions.

It was decided to take one unique printing from the blocks, which had never been printed from directly. This was skilfully done by the Rocket Press — 92 prints in a limited edition of 250 copies, together with a specially commissioned book on the engravings. It is copies of these prints that have been scanned to create the images for the 150th anniversary editions published by Pan Macmillan in 2015. The blocks are now in the British Library.

Publishing disaster — and triumph

In 1865, Carroll was keen for the first edition of Alice’s Adventures to come out as close as possible to the day on which the story was first told, three years before. Despite long delays, it was printed by the Clarendon Press in good time. Dodgson ordered a specially bound white vellum copy to be received by Alice Liddell on 4 July.

Then, on 19 July, the exacting Tenniel wrote to say that he was dissatisfied with the printing of the illustrations. As there were also faults with the printing of the text, all copies were withdrawn. The book, reprinted by Richard Clay, was finally published on 11 November that year in time for the Christmas market (and so bearing the year 1866 on the title page).

It was originally agreed that the unbound sheets of the faulty edition would be sold as waste paper. Instead, US firm David Appleton & Co bought them and 1,952 copies (of the original 2,000 copy print run) were sent to New York. The title page was redone with a New York imprint dated 1866, and the sheets machine-folded and put into cloth bindings. Of the copies not sent to the United States, just a few are known to have survived, and are extremely valuable.

The Macmillan file copy of the rejected printing, including 10 of Tenniel’s original preliminary pencil drawings, was acquired by Lord Swaythling around 1899. Eventually it made its way to collector Justin G. Schiller, who identified the purple markings as those made by Macmillan staff to show corrections for the new printing.

Within three weeks, 500 copies of the corrected November edition had been sold. On 23 December, The London Review deemed it “a delightful book for children” and “for grown-up people, provided they have wisdom or sympathy enough to enjoy a piece of downright hearty drollery”. That it was a trove of mathematical conundrums had yet to be discovered.

At Carroll’s death in 1898, the total number of copies sold by Macmillan exceeded 150,000.

Almost four years after Alice’s Adventures was published, Nature emerged on 4 November 1869. It is likely that the profits from book publishing, including those from the Alice books, enabled Macmillan to continue to publish the journal for many years. Carroll himself became a contributor to Nature.

The phenomenally fruitful and occasionally fraught partnership of author and publisher lasted for over three decades. It was a bond Carroll publicly celebrated as a factor in the success of the Alice books. In his The Profits of Authorship (Macmillan, 1884), he wrote:

The publisher contributes about as much as the bookseller in time and bodily labour, but in mental toil and trouble a great deal more. I speak…having myself, for some twenty years, inflicted on that most patient and painstaking firm, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., about as much wear and worry as ever publishers have lived through. The day when they undertake a book for me is a dies nefastus for them. From that day till the book is out – an interval of some two or three years on an average – there is no pause in the ‘pelting of the pitiless storm’ of directions and questions on every conceivable detail. To say that every question gets a courteous and thoughtful reply – that they are still outside a lunatic asylum – and that they still regard me with some degree of charity – is to speak volumes in praise of their good temper and of their health, bodily and mental.

Share the repair 

The Farnham Repair Cafe in Surrey, UK – one of over 1,000 community repair and recycling initiatives in the global Repair Cafe movement.

FARNHAM REPAIR CAFE

A few decades ago, a broken radio, fan or kettle generally triggered a trip to the repair shop. Now, it often means a journey to the dump. In Britain alone each year, over 2 million tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment are discarded; in Europe and the United States, repair services have been in decline decline for some decades. This ‘take, make and dispose’ approach sits uncomfortably with shifts towards closed-loop thinking and policy, such as the European Commission (EC) package on the circular economy, which emphasises repair, recycling and reuse.

For the past six years, a quiet repair revolution has been unfolding globally. Keen to drive local-level sustainability, Dutch journalist Martine Postma launched the Repair Café movement in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2009. The next year, fired by its success, she set up the non-profit Repair Café Foundation to provide guidelines.

There are now 1,003 centres worldwide, with hundreds in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands and 18 in Britain. Each is a community hub where local residents can bring in broken items and get them repaired for free, as well as network, learn skills, socialise and help others. Local expertise, tools, repair manuals and materials are all on hand. Melding education, social inclusivity, ‘sharing economy’ practices and sustainable action, the cafés have become nodes in the circular economy, teaching its principles from the bottom up.

In early 2014, The Centre for Sustainable Design ® (CfSD), which I head at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham, Surrey, completed the first survey into the circular economy aspects of Repair Cafés and Hackerspaces — places where the global community movements for repairing and ‘hacking’ (modifying) products come together to share knowledge and skills. The research results prompted CfSD to launch the Farnham Repair Café (FRC), a local non-profit organisation involving Transition Town Farnham (TTF), in February 2015. (This collaboration fuses CfSD experience in developing a range of innovative sustainability projects over two decades, and TTF’s local networks related to food and cycling. The Farnham Hoppers, for instance, cultivate hop plants for local brewers, while the largely volunteer-run Farnham Local Food project grows pesticide-free vegetables for sale to the community.)

The FRC offers a monthly ‘place and space’ for locals to “share in the repair”. To date, more than 500 people have participated, and over 120 items — vacuum cleaners, headphones, lamps, baby strollers and bicycles — have been repaired. That represents a diversion from landfill of near 450 kilograms of stuff, with an average repair rate within the 2.5-hour sessions of nearly 60%.

At FRC we have also established a “creative zone” for upcycling – re-assembling product parts for a new intended purpose or for an improved function. Much of this channels into Farnham’s longheld identity as a locus for design and crafts: it was a pottery centre from the sixteenth century, and an art school (now subsumed into UCA) was established there in 1880. The café offers a chance to practise the haptic (hand-to-head) skills that are essential to craft — as well as to much science. FRC also aims to create a ‘sharing economy’, cooperating with local repair businesses by advertising their work, and encouraging them to get involved directly as volunteers.

I am observing the emergence of a grassroots movement of makers, modifiers and fixers empowered by a new can-do attitude, social networking, massive access to online information and instructional videos. Beyond repair, recycling and upcycling, this sustainable community experiment shows the real ‘Big Society’ at work – people with technological skills wanting to give back to the community, and a technologically proficient, sharing community emerging.

Reflections of a Moonwalker

Gene Cernan during the last lunar walk, as commander of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

NASA

The Moon landings – those grainy shots of men in bulky suits and stunning visions of Earthrise – have burned into the public consciousness for half a century. But to those who weren’t there to watch it live and who have seen human space travel since confined to Earth’s orbit, walking on the Moon seems like a distant fairytale (a fact that no doubt contributes to the conspiracy theory that it never happened).

The Last Man on the Moon, a new documentary film, is a beautiful and timely reminder of those extraordinary days when space exploration featured on prime-time television and the price of progress was fatalities of some of the world’s brightest and bravest pilots and engineers. Director Mark Craig captures this spirit from the astronauts themselves, while they are around to tell the story.

The film follows the life of Eugene (Gene) Cernan, a plain-spoken military man who in 1972 became the last person to walk on the Moon. Cernan started out as a young Navy jet pilot in the 1950s (a time when he says he felt “bullet-proof”), before heeding the call of President John F. Kennedy. At the height of the US space race with Soviet Russia in 1961, Kennedy challenged NASA to send a man to the Moon and back by the end of the decade. In 1963 Cernan was selected as one of the agency’s third group of astronauts. He reached space three times – first carrying out NASA’s second-ever spacewalk, as part of the Gemini 9 mission, then twice journeying to the Moon on Apollo 10 and Apollo 17.

The Last Man on the Moon is at its best in recreating the spirit of the time and offering insight into the lives of a brave yet fallible group of extraordinary people. The movie could only have been made with the cooperation of the energetic 82-year-old Cernan. His narrative forms the bulk of the film, which Craig brings to life using funny, poignant interviews with his wife and other contemporaries, as well as archive material ranging from news clips to home movies. Computer-generated visuals add a dramatic tension to Cernan’s hair-raising descriptions of the space sequences, while a period soundtrack adds extra zip.

There is a joy to seeing now seventy- and eighty-somethings such as Apollo 12 crew Dick Gordon and Alan Bean, and Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell, recollect lives as the nation’s heroes. Yet from the get-go, the film reminds us that reaching space can carry a heavy price. Today most space missions are robotic, and failures waste money and time, rather than lives (though Virgin Galactic’s tragic SpaceShipTwo accident in 2014 served as a stark remind of how dangerous human spaceflight remains). Back then, NASA never hid the fact that human risk was the price of progress. Between 1964 and 1969, nine astronauts died while working on agency projects. Cernan’s close calls included one in 1966, when the training plane flown alongside his, piloted by fellow astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett, crashed and killed them. In 1971, Cernan crashed a helicopter in training, and kept his scorched helmet as a souvenir.We witness a tight-knit group of ambitious astronauts from Cernan’s 1963 intake whose young families settled as neighbours in suburban Houston, Texas. Wives became friends, and photos of their get-togethers depict classic scenes of the era with everyone partying hard — perhaps aware that any trip could be an astronaut's’ last. The images are reminiscent of television series Mad Men, albeit with even fewer women in leading roles.

The film leaves the audience to answer whether the drive of these men was selfish. Its opening scene juxtaposes images of present-day Cernan watching a rodeo, where a young bull-rider struggles to stay on his mount, with shots of the 1960s astronaut programme. But it also makes it clear that, for Cernan at least, the goal wasn’t personal glory — although he was ambitious. As he says, “The entire world was on board that spacecraft with us.”The film is no reveal-all exposé; nor is it too rose-tinted. Alongside the professional triumphs and tragedies, it touches on what Cernan’s family sacrificed. His wife Barbara quips: “If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home.” Fellow astronauts in the film acknowledge their single-mindedness and that there was no such thing as work-life balance; 60% of the astronauts from Cernan’s set ended up divorced.

As one of just 12 people to ever set foot on the Moon, Cernan says his experiences belong to everybody, especially the generations who weren’t around to see it. Today his goal is to charge kids with a sense that they can do something just as extraordinary — on Earth or in space. Watching the film left me pondering over the way human space exploration, which has demonstrated its phenomenal power to inspire and drive human understanding, has been reined in for the past 40 years.

The Hubble ‘space opera’

3Q: Paola Prestini

What inspired this project?

About four years ago, I was asked by the nonprofit Bay Chamber Concerts — who were in touch with Matt Mountain, then-head of Hubble operations centre the Space Telescope Science Institute — to create a piece commemorating the telescope’s legacy and anniversary. I began to read what Mario Livio had written on his blog, and after meeting, we began to pull together a loose narrative. With the librettist Royce Vavrek, I realised that Mario could become the inspiration for the opera’s main character. What emerged from our collaboration with Mario was a cantata drawing connections between human loss, love and sorrow, and the life cycle of a star. We decided that Mario would narrate and be the voice of the lead character, an astrophysicist who had lost his wife; there would be an adult choir, children’s choir and orchestra. No Hubble images would be used until the ending, which would culminate in a VR work exploring the beauty and depth of Hubble images. I began to record Livio, and that was the launch of the cooperation.

How does your composition incorporate science?

Both in its premise, of course, and in the technological underpinnings that have gone into creating it. I worked with sound designer Terence Caulkins from engineering firm Arup to create the 3D soundscape. To present the experience outdoors, in particular for the VR experience, we needed to create an immersive experience that gives the impression sounds are moving around and through the audience space. We mixed the music in a spatialized sound format called Ambisonics, which can be used for various loudspeaker layouts. For example, in its Soundlab Arup has a sphere of loudspeakers that allows you to place sounds around, above and below listeners to enhance the VR effect. Ambisonic sound can also be mixed down to “binaural”, which is a 360-degree sound format for headphones. (This is what people downloading our free app, Fistful of Stars, will hear.) For the performance, we designed a concentric eight-point loudspeaker system surrounding the audience. The electronic narration sequences include Mario speaking about everything from baryonic matter to extra-solar life. Filmmaker Eliza McNitt created the virtual-reality film in collaboration with the Endless Collective. This is a five-minute VR video that gives a 360-degree tour through space, comprising CGI-animated Hubble imagery of the Orion Nebula. We found a company to sponsor cardboard virtual-reality glasses for audience members.

What is it like for you as an artist to work with scientists?

Astrophysicist Mario Livio, composer Paola Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek (L to R).

JILL STEINBERG

It’s great fun. It’s fascinating to think about our creative processes and how different they are. Mario has worked with the Baltimore Symphony as a narrator for performances, but never really deeply in a music collaborative process before this one. There’s a great deal of learning going on for all of us. He needed to trust that we were going to bring these massive concepts to fruition, so there was a lot of back and forth. He is able to explain super-complex concepts, such as dark matter, to musicians; setting these texts as simple narrations was important to me so that they could be clearly understood. Hubble’s legacy and what it has done for our understanding of the Universe is at the core of our drive to give it a musical life. The loss of communication between loved ones in the cantata storyline is echoed by the expansion of the Universe “at the rate of our imagination” (something Mario often says). Yet as the fictional astrophysicist’s understanding of the Universe deepens, he reconstructs his wife’s story and understands her better. Woven together, those twin threads in the piece — the rarity of life in the grand cosmic scene, and Hubble’s revelation of that scene — connect human and cosmic scenarios, revealing realities that may exist at vastly different scales, but that are each vastly important.

Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians 

Some of the most intriguing stories in the history of US science have emerged over the past few years. It’s about time. These books centre on something long under wraps: the centrally important roles women played starting some 70 years ago in the great technological transition that gripped the twentieth century. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, 2013) chronicled the contributions of the women who worked at the secret atomic-bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt (reviewed here) depicted the mathematicians or “human computers” who crunched numbers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California from the 1940s. In this catalogue, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures is more than just another entry.

Shetterly’s book is an exploration of the groundbreaking achievements and shocking discrimination experienced by a group of talented mathematicians in all aspects of their professional and personal lives. These African-American women — Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden among them — began working from the early 1940s at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, then the nation’s premier aeronautical laboratory. That wartime breakthrough was to propel many of them into long and successful careers at the heart of the space race. (A feature film based on the book and starring Taraji P. Henson will be released in January.)

Christine Darden in the control room of Langley’s Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Darden became an expert on sonic booms and supersonic flights.

NASA

These stellar scientists broke major political and social barriers. Virginia in the American South was a segregated state. Beginning after the Civil War and lasting until the civil-rights era of the 1960s, “Jim Crow” laws enforced a rigid racial hierarchy. Shops, restaurants, public transportation — all viciously discriminated against African-Americans in matters as basic as where to use the toilet.

The mathematicians whose experience Shetterly unveils came of age in this reality. Members of a thriving African-American middle class, they went to universities such as Howard in Washington DC — historically black institutions where they were taught by eminent faculty trained at universities such as Harvard, who could not secure a position there because of their race. These accomplished young women became teachers, then generally the sole career option for educated black women. (Postgraduate education was not even possible in some states; rather than admit African-American students to its state university for graduate studies, between 1936 and 1950 Virginia paid them “scholarships” to attend graduate school elsewhere.)

Top flight

But after America entered the war in 1941, new professional opportunities opened. Langley, where engineers designed and tested technological advances that permitted US planes to fly higher and faster, needed an awful lot of number-crunchers to calculate, say, the ideal air flow over an aeroplane wing. That crushing demand opened the gates to women. Female computers began working through calculations that kept Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bomber  aloft and the North American Aviation P-51 Mustang fighter maneuvering through the skies.

Even here, however, segregation persisted. Vaughan and her colleagues were placed in Langley’s ‘West Computing’ unit. White women computed on the east side. At the back of the Langley cafeteria, a white cardboard sign labeled COLORED COMPUTERS directed the West mathematicians to sit together at lunch rather than mingle. Eventually, “tiny firebrand” Miriam Mann stole the sign, and the table was left unlabelled.

Postwar, the future was unclear, Shetterly shows. Would women be pushed out of the workforce? The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 changed all that. In 1958, the Langley lab became part of the newly formed NASA and the centre of Project Mercury, the programme for crewed space travel. The West computers scattered to other divisions to begin work on the complex calculations of getting spacecraft into orbit.Shetterly, who grew up in Hampton, illuminates this remarkable group’s professional careers and personal travails. Simply getting housing as a black woman was fraught with difficulty in these decades. It was only by harnessing the strong social networks of the African-American middle class that these mathematicians finally got a toehold in the American dream. Shared work experiences bound the group outside Langley: Vaughan and Mann brought their families together for local activities including a phenomenal performance in Hampton by iconic African-American singer Marian Anderson.

In 1959 Johnson and her colleague Ted Skopinski first calculated the mathematics of firing a capsule into ballistic flight. The equations described the flight of a spacecraft, from the angle of launch, to point of re-entry, to the effect of Earth’s rotation. Their work underlay the successful 1961 suborbital flight of astronaut Alan Shepard. The following year, when John Glenn was about to make the first US orbital flight, he personally requested Johnson to double-check, by hand, the calculations of his trajectory. Johnson went on to an illustrious career in the US space programme. Her mathematics dictated the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s descent to the surface, and their tricky rendezvous with the command module in lunar orbit in order to make it safely home. Later, she worked on the space shuttle programme. In November 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama.

Vaughan, who in the 1950s had served as Langley’s first black supervisor, forged a successful career in computer programming. Jackson achieved the rank of engineer, then turned her attention to helping other women and minorities into high-level positions. Darden, one of the next generation to benefit from the barriers broken by this group, became a world expert on sonic booms and supersonic flight.

Hidden Figures is not the definitive history of women in the space programme, nor of women at Langley. It does not need to be. It lies at the intersection of the greatest scientific advances and the greatest civil-rights battles in US history.

Smoke on the water

Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Peter Berg’s film, Deepwater Horizon, is filled with Hollywood heavyweights. Mark Wahlberg plays an everyman electrician who finds his inner hero during the disaster. Kurt Russell portrays the grizzled rig chief who steps up while everything is collapsing, and John Malkovich is the company man chasing profit at the expense of prudence. But the real star is the rig itself. Berg provides a rare look at life on board one of the most sophisticated drilling platforms on the planet. For that reason alone, the film is worth watching, despite the unnecessary liberties it takes with several key facts.

Deepwater Horizon was a US$560-million marvel of engineering, with a gleaming steel deck bigger than a football field perched on four immense floating legs. In 2009, the vessel had distinguished itself by drilling the deepest oil well to date. Owned by the company Transocean, Deepwater Horizon was leased to BP at the time of the disaster and was finishing drilling operations on the Macondo oil well, which reached 18,360 feet (5,596 metres) below sea level.

Firefighters try to extinguish blazes on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the aftermath of explosions that killed 11 people.

US COAST GUARD

The movie’s producers spared no expense on their star. Production designer Chris Seagers and his crew of 85 welders worked for eight months to build an 85% scale replica of the Deepwater Horizon, which helped to drive the cost of the movie to an estimated value well over $100 million.

To most of the public, the name Deepwater Horizon brings to mind the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed into the Gulf over 87 days after the catastrophic blowout. For the filmmakers, the spill is literally an afterthought — a few words that scroll on screen at the movie’s end. The drama concentrates instead on the first few hours of the disaster, when the crew was racing to finish its work on the long-delayed oil well.

Berg’s movie brings to life an industry that touches everybody but is seen by few. Oil and gas operations on land and offshore bore the holes that provide more than half the energy used across the globe. And yet the industry is overlooked, even shunned, in a society where most of us prefer not to dwell too much on the potentially disturbing origins of our gasoline, steak and smartphones.

Well from hell

Deepwater Horizon puts faces on the drillers, electricians, crane operators, toolpushers and mud engineers who were among the 126 people on board at the time of the explosion. That day began tensely: the crew was behind schedule in finishing up operations on the “well from hell”. Deepwater Horizon’s assigned task was to drill the hole and then seal the walls of the Macondo well with steel casing and concrete. On 20 April, the crew had finished pumping concrete to the bottom of the hole and was testing the seal job. After that, Deepwater Horizon would depart and a smaller production rig would move in to extract the oil and gas.

To the credit of Berg and the screenwriters, the movie accurately portrays many details of the critical testing phase, during which the first signs of problems arise. But in the interest of creating an engaging narrative, the filmmakers turn these pivotal scenes into a cartoonish contest of good versus evil. BP employees — particularly Malkovich’s character, Donald Vidrine — come across as primarily responsible for the disaster, while the Transocean crew members are the heroes more focused on safety.*

That stark contrast in the way the movie treats BP and Transocean does not match the conclusions of several investigative panels, which found that representatives of both companies on the rig failed to heed important warning signs that immense pressure was building up in the well. The report to President Obama from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling found plenty of blame to go around, including government regulations and the company Halliburton, which had previously identified problems in the type of cement slurry it used in the Macondo well on the morning of the blowout.

The movie also neglects to mention that Transocean did not tell the Deepwater Horizon crew about a similar pressure problem that had almost turned disastrous at one of its wells in the North Sea in late 2009 — a point raised by the National Commission in its report.  And Transocean did not identify problems with a crucial safety device, called a blowout preventer, according to an investigation by the US Chemical Safety Board, which issued its report report this year. The blowout preventer is a 400-tonne apparatus that sits on the seafloor and is designed to seal the well if the pressure inside rises to uncontrollable levels. But the crew on Deepwater Horizon did not act quickly enough when evidence of trouble first appeared and the blowout preventer failed in the crucial moment.

In the end, though, blame is not central to the movie. It is more concerned with the heroic actions of many members of the crew, including some of those who perished, which saved most of the lives on the Deepwater Horizon. Although the film alters some facts here, too, it captures the central truth that some ordinary people stepped forward in the darkest hour and committed acts of extreme bravery.

*The US government indicted Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, another BP employee on the rig at the time of the explosion, on charges of involuntary manslaughter but later dropped the charges. Vidrine pleaded guilty last December to a misdemeanor pollution charge and was sentenced to 10 months of probation, a $50,000 fine and community service. Kaluza was charged with the same offence but took the case to trial and won in February.

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.

There was a utopian edge to technology then, as America literally reached for the Moon. For artists seeking new media, high-tech expertise enabled fresh explorations in sound and vision. For the engineers, artists expanded what Klüver (already a veteran of collaborations with Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg and Cage) saw as constrained horizons. Whitman, whom I caught up with after the performance of Side Effects, recalled that the 9 Evenings teams included a lot of “arranged marriages”, but worked if goals and enthusiasms chimed.The artist behind this indeterminate, playful, technologically rich and vaguely disturbing piece, Side Effects (commissioned by Arts Catalyst) is Robert Whitman. The evening is an homage to 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a legendary series of performances that, 50 years ago, galvanised New York with an unprecedented mix of cutting-edge technologies and avant-garde art. Whitman was one of 10 artists — among them multi-media maverick Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage and choreographer Lucinda Childs — who collaborated one-to-one with 30 engineers, most from research powerhouse Bell Labs and including, notably, the visionary electrical engineer Billy Klüver. Klüver was adamant about involving technologists rather than scientists, feeling that technology is essentially about “the material and the physicality”. It was a moment that paved the way to crossover disciplines such as digital art.

By that time (October 1966), Whitman had been creating immersive pieces for some years, combining film, performers and ‘shape-changing’ props such as plastic sheeting. His 1960 The American Moon, for instance, had a hallucinatory quality and a sense of “slow time”, according to fellow experimentalist Claes Oldenburg. 9 Evenings offered a chance to push the boundaries in a bold venue.

That was the 69^th Regiment Armory, a hangar-like midtown Manhattan edifice where, over 50 years before, another exhibition had exploded America’s cultural complacency with artworks such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. For 9 Evenings, some 1,500 people a night filed into its reverberating spaces.

Signal splitters, Geiger counters

Whitman’s contribution Two Holes of Water – 3 featured input from a number of engineers, including cellular telephony researcher Robby Robinson. The piece involved 23 performers, seven plastic-wrapped cars equipped with film projectors, one of the first fibre-optic miniature video cameras, film shot using an optical device with parallel mirrors, and a signal splitter that allowed a performer’s front and back view to be superimposed. A projected live image of water being poured into a glass on the Armory floor and documentary footage of Alaskan flora and fauna also featured.

Equally bravura was Cage’s composition Variations VII (pictured above), which harnessed live feeds from numerous sound sources. As Cage ‘played’ several transistor radios, 10 telephone lines picked up ambient noises from locations round the city, including the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station and the press room of the New York Times. Signals from two Geiger counters were converted into sounds; six contact microphones amplified noises generated by performers handling devices such as juicers, while data from electrodes on the forehead of another were converted into sound waves.

Robert Whitman in the late 1960s.

A&T ARCHIVES, COURTESY LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

Some critics tore into the event, as technology historian Patrick McCray has noted. Whitman, Rauschenberg, Klüver and fellow engineer Fred Waldhauer, however, had already forged ahead with another venture. The non-profit foundation Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) took the cross-fertilisation further. By 1969, E.A.T. comprised 2,000 artists and as many technologists, riding the wave of innovation in electronics and communications. Their Projects Outside Art series, for instance, featured Telex: Q&A, which linked public spaces in India, Japan, New York and Sweden to encourage citizens of each to question future possibilities.

Meanwhile, a programme with aims similar to E.A.T.’s had sprung up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Art and Technology, the brainchild of curator Maurice Tuchman, boasted star physicist Richard Feynman as consultant. Whitman was also involved. So began his immensely fruitful teamwork with optical scientist John Forkner, then at Philco-Ford, the company that built the equipment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center mission control.

Over 18 months, Whitman and Forkner created a spectacular installation for LACMA at the US Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Tuchman described the work as an “optical tour de force” incorporating 1,000 corner-shaped mirrors reflecting the viewer’s multiplied image to them, as well as pulsating mylar mirrors and “eerily bright three-dimensional objects (a pear, drill, goldfish bowl with live fish, a knife, a clock, ferns, etc.).”“This public-relations official introduced me to a guy with a long beard. I was lucky,” says Whitman. “John was a natural genius in optics and very interested in music and art. I remember that at one point I was sitting in a car with Feynman and he said, ‘Where’d you find him? He’s terrific.’”

E.A.T. was equally busy at Expo ’70: the Pepsi Pavilion was a focus for several of its cutting-edge collaborations. A major element was a spherical mirror over 27 metres in diameter that created real images of visitors, hanging in space above their heads. Whitman contributed here too, along with physicist Elsa Garmire, while artist Fujiko Nakaya worked with physicist Tom Mee to create the evocative fog sculpture capping the structure. It was clear that by this time, as McCray puts it, artists and engineers between them had “rewired modern art”.

Whitman is now 81, and busy. Many other movers and shakers behind 9 Evenings and E.A.T. are gone. As for E.A.T. itself, it has effectively ended as an entity, but “exists as an idea,” notes its director Julie Martin (Klüver’s widow). Klüver himself, in a 1999 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, said, “once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together, there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist”.

I asked Whitman what he thought about 9 Evenings now. “Looking back is what I call ‘dead guy stuff’. You need to get onto the next thing. As for the future, it’d be fun to be around.” There is something there of the unquenchably optimistic technophile, always looking for the next innovation. Yet just for a moment, he did look back. “I didn’t know it at the time, but for me it all started with Emmett Kelly,” he told me. On a childhood visit to the circus in the 1940s, Whitman had been galvanised by the iconic American clown, who had a routine where he swept up the spotlight with a broom. “I was staring at everyone around me, wondering why they weren’t seeing this miracle. It set me on my way.”

I thought of the spotlit zipper in Side Effects, and began too to see how an early bent towards flux and illumination led him to performance, advanced technology and the intensive mix of both that was 9 Evenings. And beyond.