I love a year-end list. Or maybe, I used to love a year-end list. If I get through the paywall, it is now exhaustion or dread (usually in that order) that blankets me rather than curiosity. Whereas I used to love scanning lists like the New York Times’ “best books of the year” or TIME’s “top 100 photos of the year,” I now choose to experience the trodden time trail behind us as a (diligently compiled) string of nonsense—preferably in the form of a mad libs-style “year in weird and stupid futures” à la Max Read or the even more brain-melting whatshappening.online timeline of trending Twitter topics compiled by tech writer Brian Feldman. But one image (or set of images) did keep jumping out at me from the lists compiling the “top” photos of the year, incidentally, this was also my most screen-shot image event of the year.

This past summer, NASA, in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies, released the first set of images created from data gathered with the James Webb space telescope. The images were dramatically launched during a televised broadcast with a lengthy countdown to the reveal, widely disseminated in the media, and profusely shared on social media platforms. The headlines were dramatic. “Reminiscent of Vermeer, but carrying news of the origins of the universe, the photos are just the beginning,” reads the subtitle to a New Yorker essay by Rivka Galchen on the appearance of the images. The narrative was set early on. These are impressive, these are novel; these images shift our perspective.

The word “first” echoed throughout the broadcast and in the wake of the launch. Yet, not unlike the “best” or “top” that describes those year-end lists that I began with, this descriptor lacks precision. Were these really the “first” images taken with the telescope or, instead, a set of images created by a group of professional scientists to represent the power of their own creation and, in turn, the value of space research? If we take the media coverage at face value, the images underwrote the value of government-funded space research, inspired ruminations on the nature of humanity in a world in crisis, and, offered an opportunity to contemplate the universe—rhetoric mirroring that surrounding the famous “blue marble” photograph of the earth from 1972, another infamous first. These images undoubtedly participate in a much longer tradition of human attempts to picture the universe and the tradition of spectacular launches and landings associated with space exploration. But the broadcast and the attendant clamor also show how images themselves can be made into historic events—something for the history books!

The James Webb images required the apparatus of the televised broadcast and the space agencies’ interpretation to help viewers make sense of what they were looking at. Journalists and individual social media users took care of the rest, spreading the images with fervor. Many seemed genuinely moved by these images. Though I watched the launch with great interest, my cockles remain unwarmed and full of questions. How were these images made and why were “we” to experience them as new, as “first”? Surely, these were not even strictly images in any conventional sense of the word? But rather, visualizations of complex, and perhaps unfeeling, scientific datasets.

Others had similar questions. In an article by Jamie Carter, for Forbes, the team of “image manipulators” working with the Webb project team was given center stage.

“When you get the data down, they don’t look anything like a beautiful color image,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at STScI, who heads-up a team of 30 expert image manipulators. “They don’t hardly look like anything at all [and] it’s only if you know what to look for that you can appreciate them.”

Pontoppidan goes on to describe the meticulous planning behind the creation of the images, a process with a stated goal of demonstrating the power of the telescope while also “highlighting science.” The images are, in other words, images of the ability to “see” the universe as much as they are images of specific phenomena in the universe. After all, the telescope doesn’t actually collect data that the human eye can see. Instead, the telescope is used as a tool to measure infrared light not otherwise visible to the human eye. This data is then manipulated and colorized for viewing. The “first images” from the James Webb space telescope are highly instrumental visualizations.

Scientists have been creatively crafting stable images and objects to communicate scientific observations for as long as there has been something to call “science.” To point this out is not to decry or devalue scientific knowledge but rather to recognize that the communication of knowledge is always a process of mediation. This was surely the case with the spectacular launch of the images. The live-streamed event that introduced the images to the world was an awkwardly choreographed, if charmingly nerdy, production intended to dramatize the processes of scientific innovation itself. The colorized images presented at the end of the countdown were not only spectacular in the most literal sense—a specially-designed display—but also to be understood as the “first” of their kind.

A first indicates a rupture with what has come before. In science or technology, this is usually described as an invention or a discovery. The process by which inventions or discoveries come to be is often understood by the shorthand: innovation. Emerging dramatically at the end of a countdown, the images created from the data gathered by the scientific team operating the James Webb telescope are used to make an argument about the self-professed (and fundamentally humanist) goal of space research: to better understand the universe. But the language with which the James Webb images were made to do so reveals a larger pattern. “Firsts” are used to craft a narrative of innovation in which science and technology are the main mechanisms by which such a “progress” of knowledge occurs. That is, the “first images” from the James Webb space telescope only became images in order to tell a story about the value of the telescope from which the data underlying the images was sourced. Innovation is as much a rhetorical, aesthetic, and ideological process, as it is a technical or scientific one.

For me, the word “first,” like “best” or “top” is always a red flag.1 Like hierarchy, linearity has a purpose. Things are ordered, first, middle, last, more often than not, violently. The case of the James Webb images might appear a somewhat innocuous example of this but each "first" displaces something. In fact, even the naming of the telescope is evidence of this, with some criticizing the naming of the telescope after James Webb, a former NASA administrator who also held high-ranking positions in the US Department of State during a period in which they systematically discriminated against employees for their sexual orientation. Describing these highly manipulated images as depictions of the "origins of the universe" is to uphold a particular regime of knowledge—one that prizes the clairvoyance of its own tools. Novelty has incredible purchase on public attention. In such an environment, "firsts" clear ground in order to make an argument for their own significance. Beware the first!

**Editor’s note: Consider this year-end edition of “unsolicited recommendations” an “unsolicited self-promotion.”

This year, I published three texts as part of my editorial residency with Public Parking. With their support, I commissioned and edited texts by Olivia Klevorn and Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe. To close out my residency, I wrote an essay about Sara Cwynar’s recent work.

For the Summer issue of Border Crossings magazine, I reviewed the exhibition “The Formless Body” at Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and the parallel book project Devotion: Today’s Archive is Tomorrow’s Future, curated and edited by Jarrett Earnest.

For the Fall issue of BlackFlash magazine, I profiled Lan Florence Lee.

In a most special collaboration, I wrote an essay to accompany my brilliant sister Hannah’s exhibition at Platform Centre in Winnipeg.

Coming soon are two texts on the Airgraph mail system, forthcoming in the new year in Transbordeur and on the British Library blog.

Behind the scenes, a book is taking shape!