Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘power’

Jan 2

2012: autonomous infrastructures, uneasy energies, and the machine wilderness …

Yahoo. 2012! What’s coming up this year in the art/science world? Here’s a highly subjective list of things I’m looking forward to.

Melanie Jackson, still from new work (in progress), 2012

Arts Catalyst’s Republic of the Moon exhibition is currently running at FACT, Liverpool, to 26 February, and there’ll also be a Kosmica event at FACT at the end of the month. In March, Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ Moon Goose Analogue tours to the Great North Museum, Newcastle, as part of AV Festival.

Later this month, we’ll announce a call for an exciting artist’s fellowship at a major science facility in Europe (details to come). We’ll also be launching a new series of workshops and commissions in our Autonomous Artists’ Infrastructures strand, following on from the Planetary Breakdown event at BALTIC, including new work by Hehe.

We’ll be busy all year round in our Clerkenwell space in London with a new series of Kosmicas and other events, exhibitions and workshops, beginning with ‘Trust Me, I’m an Artist’, exploring the ethics of art/science collaborations. Later this Spring, I’m greatly looking forward to showing our new commission from Melanie Jackson, a new essay film that takes us from the botanical garden to the synthetic biology laboratory in the artist’s ongoing investigation into the impulse for form, informed by her participation in our Synthesis workshop last year.

Throughout the year, we’ll unveil a number of other artists’ projects currently in development at different venues across the UK. I’m also planning to trail Alec Finlay when I can around the northernmost parts of Scotland for his investigations into small-scale wind power. And we’ll continue our involvement in the Arctic Perspective Initiative.

Illustration from E. W. Golding's The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power (1955). From Alec Finlay’s http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/

Beyond Arts Catalyst, Berlin’s wintry transmediale is always a good get-together for people inhabiting the art-tech-politics end of the art and science spectrum. This year, the festival takes the theme of ‘in/compatible’. Its exhibition ‘Dark Drives – Uneasy Energies in technological times’ promises “works of art and artefacts of everyday culture that direct our attention to the dark side of our technologised lives”, including a series of photographs by environmental scientists Vibek Raj Maurya and Jack Caravanos of the overwhelming amounts of electronic waste deposited in developing world.

Vibek Raj Maurya, e-waste series, Accra, Ghana

In June, back to Germany as documenta finally rolls around again. Will there be much engagement with science in this 5-yearly massive survey of contemporary art?  How could there not be, if it plans at all to consider art in relationship to contemporary existence, given the currency of environmental issues and 2011′s scientific excitements, which have included glimpses of the Higg’s boson, Einstein-defying neutrinos, and the discovery of Earth’s “twin”? We know, at least, that Amy Balkin’s ongoing Public Smog project will be part of documenta (13), relocating her park in the atmosphere and intelligent discourse over governance of the skies to Kassel.

Amy Balkin, Public Smog (2004 ongoing). Part of documenta (13)

Of the UK’s Cultural Olympiad offerings this year, I’m keen to see Owl Project’s FLOW, an environmentally sustainable watermill on the River Tyne, come to fruition after all their hard work, and I’d like to hop onto Alex Hartley’s Arctic nowhereisland, navigating the South-West of England coast. Meanwhile, Film and Video Umbrella is commissioning a series of moving image artworks that reflect that transient period when an athlete attains a heightened state of performance, generated by four artist-scientist partnerships: Dryden Goodwin and Elsa Bradley; Cornford and Cross and Dr Richard Ramsey; Susan Pui San, Tali Sharot and Nicky Clayton; and Roderick Buchanan and Dr David Shearer. All four new works will be shown at De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, in summer 2012.

Come Autumn/Fall, I’m already very excited about ISEA 2012, taking place this year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and glorying in the title ‘Machine Wilderness’. The themes are very much up our street: The Cosmos, Wildlife, Transportation, Power. New Mexico: it’s got deserts, it’s got mountains, it’s got art, and it’s even got a dropzone. What’s not to love?

Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, SEFT-1, Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada, Manned Railway Exploration Probe. Showing at ISEA 2012.

Back from ISEA in September, I may pay a visit to the small market town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, birthplace of Isaac Newton, where they’re planning a “major art and science festival”. (It’s also the birthplace of Maggie Thatcher, but let’s not go there)

What have I left out? Let me know your art and science highlights for 2012, particularly in other parts of the globe.

Oct 7

Realities and dreams: Africa in space

A stunning and detailed black and white image of Africa from space

Mosaic of high-res images of Africa captured by Canada's RADARSAT-1 satellite

Today is the last day of the 62nd International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Cape Town, South Africa. The IAC is a vast annual meeting of the space world, organized by the International Astronautical Federation, attended by the heads and senior executives of the world’s space agencies, astronomers, space lawyers, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and astronauts. This is the first time it has taken place in an African country.

What is the relevance of space exploration to African countries? African astronomy has a long history, as explored in the excellent documentary Cosmic Africa, made in 2003 with South African astronomer Thebe Medupe. South Africa has been involved in a limited way in space activities since the 1960s. Today, several African nations are emerging as participants in the space technology race. Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria and Egypt have launched their own satellites. A few years ago, Nigeria announced an intention to send the first Nigerian astronaut into space. South Africa already has its own astronaut, Mark Shuttleworth, the second self-funded space `’tourist`’. South Africa is also competing with Australia to host the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world’s largest radiotelescope.

Bright projection of a globe apparently onto a transparent screen or floating, behind which a man and woman are seen

Alejo Duque & Joanna Griffin: Bogota Declaration

Economic benefits are obviously the driving force for space technology development in Africa. But there are cultural and political issues around the management and exploitation of space, in which African people should have a voice. The contentious issue of geostationary orbits is one example. A geostationary orbit is where satellites orbit the earth above the equator, such that they appear to be stationary from the earth. Geostationary satellites have revolutionised global communications, and have important defense and intelligence applications. Naturally, early on the United States and the Soviet Union occupied the most valuable and coveted spots in geostationary orbit. In 1976, eight equatorial countries, including Kenya, Congo and Uganda, claimed sovereignty over the geostationary orbit, in the Bogotá Declaration, drawing attention to the inequity of orbital allocations. The Bogotá Declaration is the subject of a project by artists Alejo Duque and Joanna Griffin exploring the poetics of the declaration as well as the “inequalities in technological power, the physics of orbit and its contested spaces”.

The goal of the International Astronautical Federation’s technical activities committee on the cultural utilization of space (ITACCUS), of which I’m co-chair, is to promote a self-reflective space culture that promotes the peaceful use of space. It would be great to see African artists develop a cultural response to the new space drive as it develops. We welcome nominations for new ITACCUS members from African countries who can be liaisons to both African space and cultural organisations.

Picture of installation of paintings and sculpture depicting space themes merging contemporary and traditional Burkina Faso art styles

Work by Marco Boggio Sella and unnamed artist/s from Burkino Faso in the exhibition: Dreams and Nightmares of the African Astronauts

Man standing in desert looking at ancient arrangement of stones on the ground

Calendar circle in the Sahara desert visited by Thebe Medupe in Cosmic Africa

Oct 2

Power in outer space

Yesterday, I was one of the speakers at the Power in Outer Space symposium at the University of Brighton. The aim of the symposium was to provide a forum to discuss issues about social power and outer space.

Archive black and white photo of a rocket on a launch scaffolding

Soviet/Russian Buran reusable spacecraft project

The Arts Catalyst has been working on space-related artists’ project for 12 years. One thing that has struck me over the years is how under-examined and critiqued space exploration is across the social sciences and humanities, although there have been some welcome developments in recent years, such as Fraser MacDonald’s 2007 paper “Anti-Astropolitik – outer space and the orbit of geography“, and Peter Dickens and James Ormrod’s 2007 book ‘Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe’.

So this symposium was a welcome development, although it perhaps wasn’t a huge surprise that it wasn’t well attended on the hottest October day on record, because this area hasn’t exactly picked up a big following. But I was particularly glad to see an undergraduate attending clutching a big tome on feminism.

The other speakers were excellent and included convener James Ormrod and Prof Peter Dickens, authors of Cosmic Society, Dr Jill Stuart, an expert in space law from the London School of Economics, and Prof Dave Webb from the Praxis Centre at Leeds Metropolitan University. Topics explored included the use of outer space to control warfare on Earth, the monitoring of social groups through space technology, the commodification of space resources, the control of outer space by nation states, and the risk posed by nuclear space technologies and space debris.

My own paper on “’The Cultural Utilisation of Space” considered the contribution of the alternative perspectives and re-imaginings of artists to developing a new cultural and societal dialogue about space, and explored the activities of contemporary artists working towards the appropriation and conversion of space activities and technologies for civilian and cultural use. I examined our own strategic initiatives, such as the forming of the International Astronautical Federation’s Technical Activities Committee on Cultural Utilisation of Space, and I talked about our work with the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Russia, the European Space Agency, and, of course, the exhibitions and events we have organised to bring our work to a wide public, such as Space Soon at the Roundhouse and our forthcoming Republic of the Moon.

Sunset. A line of white geese follow a woman carrying a large moon slung on a stick over her shoulder

Agnes Meyer Brandis, Moon Goose Analogue (2011)