Week 9: Space + Art

To begin this week's blog post, I really want to share some space-themed music. I love space, I've always been fascinated by it, and I think that the artist, A.L.I.S.O.N, really captures the celestial "vibe" of experiencing the cosmos. 



Space has often been described as "the final frontier", a direct reference to the opening lines spoken by William Shatner in the original run of the now-iconic science-fiction series Star Trek. Many people genuinely see it as such, and it's not difficult to understand why. We exist on a tiny speck, in a little system, somewhere in the middle of a single galaxy, amongst billions upon billions of other galaxies, all of which have countless little systems and tiny specks of their own. Whether the thought terrifies you or reassures you, as far as we know, we are the only thing that makes our planet unique. Space is has done wonders for human art, both as an inspiration and as a medium. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that any piece of fiction that has anything to do beyond the confines of the Earth qualifies as "space art". This encompasses anything set in or about space, and honestly, most science-fiction. 

The majority of the intersection between art and space has to do with art about space, and here, I'm going to loosely talk about art about space as any piece of artwork that uses space as either an inspiration or as a focus. I'm talking about movies such as Interstellar, books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, songs like the one I hope you're listening to right now. On a personal note, I love art that focuses on space, since it's all about   The intangibility of the subject both restricts it and frees it; you're not going to find many sculpture installations, and art in the sense we've discussed in previous weeks fails to really apply to anything that can be done here. But that's also really liberating in many ways, since now we can explore concepts based on actual science. The acknowledgement of the impossible humbles us and forces us to essentially use our imagination and little else. 

Art done in space is my least favorite idea of "space art", simply because it's frankly boring. I'm not talking about artworks that fundamentally require the conditions exclusive to space to exist, but instead man-made art that was created outside of Earth's atmosphere for the sake of doing so. An example of this is NASA's Blue Marble image series (NASA). I think that in 1972, photographing the earth was new, novel, and unique. I think that it put a lot of people's understandings about human life into perspective, and that socially, the picture was taken at the right time. And I think that the image has value in how it was the last whole-Earth image to have been taken, as since then, there hasn't been a manned mission that has gone far enough to do so. But every subsequent image, every satellite composite of the face of the Earth, has felt artificial and imitative. And I cannot explain why, but I think that the notion of taking pictures of the Earth from space is just boring now. 


The Blue Marble
https://www.nasa.gov/content/blue-marble-image-of-the-earth-from-apollo-17


Even worse though, are artworks either flown into space or created in space for the sake of it. I remember griping about the Sojourner 2020 launch and the associated Earthlings project run by the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative (MIT). Artists were invited to submit pieces and those selected were launched into low Earth orbit in a rotating capsule. To be entirely honest, I couldn't see past how pointless it was. The idea of sending art to space wasn't groundbreaking, nor was the vessel in which they were being sent. I'm not saying that everything done has to be innovative and new, but this project, in my opinion, embodied all the worst aspects of space art. It was nothing more than a spectacle by MIT to pat themselves on the back with, a show for absolutely nobody to see. I could see how the idea of sending the art to space elevated the individual pieces, literally and metaphorically, but I think it cheapened the art by making a spectacle of it. In short, art sent to space is also boring, because it becomes less about the art and more about the "sent to space". 


Sojourner 2020
 https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/sojourner-2020/


But the best space art, I'd say, is art that is exclusive to space. The art requires the conditions of space to exist, to be experienced, and transcends the idea of merely being art that is created or performed in space. That's why I love the fact that there's currently a second space race between the U.S. and Russia to be the first country that has a movie, or at least part of one, filmed in space (NBC News). That's why I love the idea of commercially available spacewalks so much, that someday in the future, the common person can afford to fly up into orbit and experience weightlessness and see for themselves the cosmos in all its majesty. And that's why I think that performing experiments on biology and human development in zero gravity is an art in itself, since we cannot do that on Earth, like NASA's project for growing vegetables in space and studying the effects of zero-gravity on structural support and microwave radiation on growth (NASA). It's an exploration of space, yes, but its even more so an exploration of ourselves within it. 


Growing crops in space
https://www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space.


I think that the pursuit of space travel by humanity is a perfect encapsulation of everything that makes us human. It embodies our innate curiosity to explore the unknown, the wonder and awe found in the cosmos, the perseverance to escape the planet we call home, the desire to believe in something more. I think we have little better to explore than the reaches of space, so I hope I live to see the day when we do set out into the final frontier. 



Works Cited

A.L.I.S.O.N. Space Station. Eye Witness Records, 2018.

Bodner, Matthew. “Russia, Racing to Beat Tom Cruise and NASA to First Movie Shot in Space, Picks Its Cast.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 14 May 2021, www.nbcnews.com/science/space/russia-racing-beat-tom-cruise-nasa-first-movie-shot-space-n1267341.

“Blue Marble Next Generation.” NASA, NASA, 13 Oct. 2005, earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_history.php.

Heiney, Anna. “Growing Plants in Space.” NASA, NASA, 9 Apr. 2019, www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space.

Huston, Cory. "NASA's Matt Romeyn works in the Crop Food Production Research Area of the Space Station Processing Facility at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida." 2018. NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space.

Liu, Xin. "Sojourner loaded with all artists projects." 2020. MIT Media Lab, https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/sojourner-2020/

Liu, Xin. “Sojourner 2020: An International Art Payload to ISS.” MIT Media Lab, MIT, 3 Mar. 2020, www.media.mit.edu/posts/sojourner-2020/.

Martin, Gary. “'Space: the Final Frontier' - the Meaning and Origin of This Phrase.” Phrasefinder, www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/328700.html.

Schmitt, Harrison. The Blue Marble. 1972. NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/content/blue-marble-image-of-the-earth-from-apollo-                17 
   






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Event: MycoMythologies

Image
I attended the event on MycoMythologies, partly because I needed to attend an event that I was actually interested enough in to talk about, and partly because fungi is biologically fascinating to me. I have always had a morbid fascination with death, less so spiritually and more so with the physical processes involved with it. In my "extensive" personal research, I have obviously looked into the role of fungi as a part of the global food web, and the importance of decay in restoring nutrients to ecosystems. This is likened to the concept of conservation of mass, except with inflows of natural energy and outflows of work exerted. Decay exists as an extant form of life, and death it inescapable. So I have always seen fungi as the end-all-be-all of organic life outside of the eventual heat death of the universe.  The lovely Ms. Vesna, and me in the top left. The more I understood about fungi, the more I realized I didn't understand. This experience with MycoMythologies was n...
Read more

Week 1: Two Cultures

Image
I don't believe in ascribing myself to the category of "artist" or "scientist". In fact, I find that I am neither artist nor scientist, as unnecessary labels and the stereotypes associated with them are more limiting than they have any right to be.  Charles Percy Snow's concept of the existence of "Two Cultures", especially in the context of education, is certainly true; the schism between what we define culturally as "art" and what we define as "science" has only become more profound, to the extent that some may consider them antonymous (Snow 18). The coining of the term "science" in the mid-19th century by William Whewell and its later recognition by the compilers of the Oxford dictionary to specify "physical and experimental science" demarcates a point in time when the split between the two cultures was recognized (Vesna 121). It seems apparent that this cultural division is a product of post-Industrial so...
Read more

Event 3: Contact Viewing Party

Image
Last week, on Thursday I think, I attended the watch party for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster as Eleanor Arroway and Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss (IMDb). The movie begins with the young and hopeful Ellie as she speaks with people from across the continental United States with a HAM radio, a predecessor to her work in using radio frequencies and satellites to contact aliens. I'm not particularly interested in providing a more detailed synopsis of the film, nor am I really going to be talking about the final acts which have too much fiction and and not enough science for my taste. I also don't care for the the human drama aspect of the film, since that's not at all relevant to the course or the nature of this blog post. Very Large Array in New Mexico https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/ I did, however, notice some interesting things when watching the film, the first being that the broadcast was sent to the center of the Vega system. Veg...
Read more