Above is a world-first: an image forged in space, where art and science converge into something both material and unknowable. On May 2nd, 2025, unexposed photographic film was carried using a weather balloon beyond Earth’s atmosphere to 121,000 feet, four times the height at which commercial airlines fly, into a region where radiation moves unfiltered and unseen, far beyond the conditions in which images are traditionally made. There, without lens or camera, ultraviolet C radiation and cosmic radiation (muons), formed from the event horizons of black holes millions of light-years away, are etched directly into the emulsion, forming an image not through light, but through contact, through exposure to forces that exist beyond human vision. Created in total darkness, it is an image that should not exist: a record of interaction rather than observation, where the universe forges itself onto material. What remains is a raw analogue trace of the universe’s most extreme energies. 

The project depicts space in a way never seen before, they offer a haunting, abstract look at the extreme invisible forces that surround our planet, blurring the lines between fine art and nuclear physics.

HELIOS I paved the way for HELIOS II and HELIOS III. With these negatives following an identical process to the first, they were launched once more, this time just under 120,000 feet, replicating near-identical conditions and exposure. The result depicted above, however, reveals how fragile the process is, with the container the negative was placed in being pierced when it landed up a 75 ft tree in a national park in the USA. This test was used to validate the original experiment, ensuring that the results were not an anomaly, but a repeatable interaction between the material and the radiation present beyond Earth’s atmosphere.