NASA image AS17-148-22727 — the iconic “Blue Marble” — is the apex of one way of envisioning the earth; it may also offer us an important tool to imagine the earth yet to come.

Captured in the 6cm-square interior of a single Hasselblad camera in transit from from the Earth to the Moon, the image is an analog, counter-prelude to the tens of thousands of digital sensors that now orbit the earth from space. This network is now our primary lens on the climate crisis. Its enormous, invisible lens reveals, above all, the urgent need to profoundly reimagine the relationship between technology and the Earth.

Yet how do we picture what is so hard to imagine? Ascents: Events: Implements turns to the past as essential prelude. Drawing on the physical and spatial language of Apollo—including the black, anti-reflective coating of the modified Hasselblad 500C that recorded AS17-148-22727—the project presents twelve speculative instruments, many revealing folded, golden forms that catch and reflect fragmented images of the Earth.

Designed by modem and Smout Allen, the work resists solutionism. Instead, it stages encounters — in isolated pools of light — between artifact and allegory, past and future, memory and imagination. The project presents design not as a tool of mastery, but a medium for reimagining all we have yet to know.