Even nowadays there is an opinion among ordinary people that a work of art is necessarily an object made by the hands of the artist with his direct participation. While the second part of this statement does in part remain an important condition for artistic creativity (a work of art cannot become such at all without the influence of the author's will), in today's world technology no longer requires the artist to do "manual" work in the narrow sense of the word. On the one hand, it has become kind of norm to entrust a number of applied operations to qualified specialists who become part of the creative team as technical executors of the director's idea. In other cases, however, the instrument used by the artist in his work is not available for "direct" contact at all, being located beyond the reach of human hands.

Works devoted to space aesthetics provide a visual representation of this kind of situation. This type of work often uses technical material from satellites and other vehicles that are launched into orbit or descend to the surface of space bodies without the task of their subsequent return to Earth. While some of them can still be accessed "directly", many of these vehicles can only be controlled remotely and sometimes only by influencing semi-autonomous algorithms of their operation. Thus, it would seem that the source material obtained with these apparatuses has nothing to do with the field of art, as it is as neutral as possible from the point of view of the author's influence.

Nevertheless, the sphere of contemporary art demonstrates that this physical distance between the artist and his instrument does not stop talented authors who create sophisticated, spectacular and commercially demanded art projects. The projects of the German artist Thomas Ruff, a representative of the famous Düsseldorf "school," such as Cassini and ma.r.s. (short for Mars Reconnaissance Survey).

The works in this series were based on black-and-white footage from NASA's flying and descent spacecraft research projects. The original images were originally intended to serve solely as visual evidence, but Ruff took them beyond the natural sciences into the realm of artistic creation. In the images of views of Saturn and the surface of Mars, Ruff saw unusual shapes and textures, similar to those that avant-garde artists sought to visualize based on their abstract fantasies. To enhance this effect, Ruff incorporated colors that matched his own author's vision of space subjects into the space imagery that NASA provided, and he also brought in the illusion of volume that can be seen by wearing simple 3D glasses. It is also no coincidence that the author chose large dimensions for his works, which allowed him to draw attention to the bizarre details of the shapes and textures of space bodies.

Ruff's image-based spacecraft projects are also interesting for the reason that they come close to the problem of future artistic creation, in which machines involving artificial intelligence are already beginning to take part. After all, this situation is causing many questions concerning the problems of machines' capacity for thinking, emotional perception and creativity which are important for creatingart. There is still no answer to these complex philosophical questions, but this does not stop artists, who in their creativity are striving to reach new, previouslвy unknown heights of space art.

Artem Loginov