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Space Art

Anomalie Digital_Arts Issue, no.4
Festival of @rt Outsiders, Orleans, France, 2003

288 pp., euros 22
ISBN: 2-910385-33-7
Distributor’s Website: http://www.Editions-Hyx.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

This summer four Dartmouth College varsity athletes, all women, tested an exercise regimen for muscles in microgravity environments they had developed aboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's KC135 "Weightless Wonder" aircraft as participate in the 2004 Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.  If even college jocks are going weightless, what of artists?

The Space Art Anomalie Digital_Arts Issue no.4 chronicles work by artists around the world involved in microgravity research exhibited or discussed at the Festival of @rt Outsiders at Orleans, France in 2003.  The Festival's guiding spirit was Henry Chapier, and its artistic directors were Jean-Luc Soret and Emmanuelle Quinz.  Readers of Space Art will find it helpful that every essay in French was translated into English, and vice versa, yet each essay followed by its translation——or all essays in a single language grouped together——may have meant quicker reading.

There are reports on gallery-friendly installations making use of video and multiple photographic images, Ewen Chardronnet's "Open Sky," "Spaced Out" by Addictive TV (Graham Daniels and Nick Clarke), plus works by Miguel Chevalier and Pierre Comte.  Richard Clar investigates the sculptural qualities and potential of orbital debris, whether in space or fallen to earth.  Among its cultural effects, space exploration and travel will have an impact even upon the exhibition and curatorial/pedagogic explication of art, which inspires Susan Collins' "Tate in Space" website, housing essays and discussions of art in space.  This reviewer recalls proposals for space art put forth at the International Sculpture Conference in Oakland, CA over twenty years ago.  Work still in the conceptual realm is publicized online, as at Marc Battier's Art Technologies site (http:// www.arttechnologies.com).

All terrestrial cultures and their artworks unquestioningly accept the masses and weights of both objects and the human body under the gravitational conditions that we are used to and take for granted.  There is great potential for space art innovation to work unaffected by normal gravity and question these assumptions, and such investigation is underway by the MIR (Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research) group and others.   Rob La Frenais' video "Gravitation Off!" documents a 1999 project that employed an Ilyusahin MDK-76 Flying Laboratory airplane to give artists the experience of Zero G.  Yet with knowledge gained from his participation, La Frenais forswears space travel until the technology is improved.

Astrophysicist and Leonardo publisher Roger Malina notes in his essay that over two dozen artists have explored zero-gravity art production and experiences. Photographs in the Space Art issue show the amazement, delight (and, occasionally, nausea) of artists violating some of the most unforgiving laws of all, those of gravity.

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Updated 1st October 2004


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