Darkeness and dust

The "dark text" of Claude Horstmann, seen at the Daimler Collection in Berlin a couple of years ago, continues to intrigue me - it did in March, when this post was started, and still does now. The way you have to move to see the writing is like stumbling around in the dark, and encountering an object by stumbling over it or bumping into it. The amount of effort required to read the text, though - what would motivate someone to make that much effort? Is there something that would catch the attention to the extent that you'd need to know as much as possible about the work ... to retrace its making, in effect, via the reading....

In looking for other images of Horstmann's work, I found the work of Karel Nel, a South African artist who collaborates with scientists, recently on the COSMOS project. Fascinating to see his reinterpretation of images from the Hubble telescope; above is Bandwidth (540 million year old black carboniferous dust and salt).

The images in the compilation above are (top) Satawal;  Sector, Two Square Degrees; Stellar Grammar (540 million-year-old carboniferous dust from Gondwanaland and salt from the Atlantic ocean on a wooden base); bottom, photo published in an Oct 2008 issue of Nature, which can be "rented" for $3.99; There But Not There.