EXTRAVAGANT BODIES: Crime and punishment

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 increasingly large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography in the US and internationally. Benson takes raw data from planetary science archives and processes it, edits, composites, and then ‘tiles’ individual spacecraft frames, producing seamless large-format digital C prints of landscapes currently beyond direct human experience.
He is also an award-winning filmmaker, with work that straddles the line between fiction and documentary film practice. In Predictions of Fire and other films, staged studio scenes and animated sequences alternate with straight documentary material. From 2008- until 2010, 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. Benson’s fifth book for Abrams, Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, was a finalist for the Science and Technology award at the 2015 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities, a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, and a Weizmann Institute of Science Advocate for Curiosity.