EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS IN ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

SpaceArt

By Roger Malina, Director, NASA EUVE Observatory at the University of California, Berkeley, California; Director, Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale CNRS, Marseille, France.

Toggle your imagination. Visualize floating dancers, galactic art galleries, buoyant paint balls.

Then ponder this: What artwork, sounds, or texts would you choose to tuck into a satellite time capsule - Destination: Planet Earth; ETA 52,000 A.D.?

Even while the idea of space colonies continues to intrigue most of us, visual and performance artists are one step ahead of the game, pioneers in an artistic renaissance which hs expanded the dimensions of their work into the "final frontier." Artists and writers have always been among the first explorers of new continents, and space is no exception. Already, the first space artists are beginning to lay the seeds for tomorrow's culture. And they are performing their work in zero gravity.

Kitsou Dubois, Space dancer

What dancer doesn't dream of defying gravity? Of floating above the floor and dancing through the air and above Ground Zero?

Kitsou Dubois, a French dancer and choreographer, has danced with astronauts and cosmonauts for several years, teaching them dance steps and fluid movements to help them in function more effectively in weightless environments. In zero gravity, a dancer can dance on the floor, walls or ceiling, or even while floating in the space between the floor and ceiling. In her space dance experiments, Kitsou has made a number fascinating discoveries. She has larned that a dancer's training enables him or her to adapt easily to zero gravity. Since dancers visualize their movements relative to their own body rather than relative to the walls - it is not so shocking for a dancer to float upside down.

Kitsou found the experience of dancing in zero gravity so exciting and liberating that she has introduced new kinds of dance steps inspired by this experience into her ground-based dance choreography . Her work reflects her fascination with the fact that, because we are accustomed to seeing peaople and the worldfrom one perspectvive that we can become totally disoriented upon seeing people positioned, or oriented differently, in space. For example, in space two people can walk simultaneously through a door into a room , one person with their feet on the ceiling and one with their feet on the floor. The disorientation that can result from this subversion of gravity includes the fact that, as psychologists have long known, it is hard to recognize a person's face when the face is upside down.

In her work with astronauts, Kitsou has also discovered that many of the exercises dancers use to practice are quite useful for astronauts. Most astronauts are not as well trained as dancers are in the control of their bodies. With some dance training, astronauts can adapt more rapidly to living in space.

Frank Pietronigro, Space Painter

Mud Baths in the "Vomit Comet"

Imagine free-flowing liquid paint. Or undulating spheres of color colliding above the atmosphere to create extraordinary new colors. Non-gravitational painting suggests the creation of an extraordinary new style, which just might be dubbed "non-convergency."

Frank Pietronigro and his art students recently carried their paints and pallettes along for a sojourn aboard NASA's astronaut training plane. Pietronigro had long wondered about experimenting with his paints and canvases in zero gravity and was thrilled when NASA officials gave the go ahead to his proposal.

Last year, Pietronigro and some of his students actually went up in the aeroplane, sometimes referred to as the "vomit comet" because the experience makes so many people nauseous. Their attempts to put paint to canvas was a definite "no go." Frank set up a large plastic tent in the plane where he and his students attempted to paint pictures. The experience became quite humorous as the painting class quickly mutated into a collective mud bath. Wobbling globes of paint migrated from their palettes and floated around the room, colliding with the ceilings and walls, and splashing Frank and his students. Very little of the paint stuck to the canvas! It became obvious that, in zero gravity, liquids behave quite differently than they do on earth.

This made for quite interesting variations in 'painting technique': in their attempts to mix colors, the artists pushed two spheres of paint together, which created very unusual color effects on the surfaces of the spheres as the colors collected on the outside of the paint balls.

Arthur Woods, Space Sculptor

Celestial space-memory sculptures

It's easy to imagine how the alluring concept of space might suggest itself as a kind of theatre, or set, to a budding artist growing up in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Over the last ten years, Arthur Woods developed several space art projects, including a proposal for a large inflatable space sculpture that would have been visible from earth as a symbol of global unity.

Although this inflatable project was never realized, Woods was successful in organizing the first art exhibition in space aboard the Russian Mir Space Station. For this project, Woods orchestrated an exhibition of some 15 paintings that were sent up and exhibited inside the space station. The cosmonauts then selected their favorite work to keep on board. This painting joins a number of other cultural projects on the space station, including an electric organ taken up by a French cosmonaut.

After the success of the space art exhibition, Woods convinced the cosmonauts to take one of his sculptures, "Cosmic Dancer," aboard Mir. "Cosmic Dancer" floated in the middle of the cabin where the cosmonauts were able to treach out and spin it. This space sculpture is kinetic -- a moving object that can be viewed from any direction. This non-static aspect of space art will surely expand the principles of design that future sculptors consider for their creations.

Jean Marc Philippe, Space Media Artist

The Milky Way is the medium selected by French artist Jean Marc Philippe as the vehicle for his artistic message. Throughout his career, Jean Marc has tackled artistic projects with an eye towards releasing them above the atmosphere. His first successful design used a large radio telescope to broadcast messages - poems, questions, texts - from thousands of people in France out into space.

Jean Marc is now constructing a unique satellite: "Keo," that is a floating time-capsule. He is inviting people from around the world to submit artworks, texts and sounds that will travel aboard Keo on its 50,000 year voyage. Additionally, Jean Marc has been working for many years to place the first sculpture-monument on the planet Mars. The sculpture would be deployed by one of the space probes scheduled to travel to Mars during the next decade. The sculpture is composed of an extraordinary shape-memory alloy which morphs into different forms depending on the temperature. Jean Marc has designed the sculpture so that it will have a different appearance and shape at Martian sunrise when the atmosphere is coolest and at Martian afternoon when it is the warmest.

Frank Malina, Space Artist and Engineer

Space Landscapes

Artists, by their very profession, interpret the landscape and translate what we see into subjective terms. Landscape painters through the centuries have influenced our views of nature and our appreciation of natural phenomena. Images like those relayed from the Hubble Space Telescope inspire our dreams of the vastness of space and the beauty of the natural landscape.

One artist who interpreted the space landscape was my father, astronautical engineer Frank Malina. He led the American team that developed the first successful research rocket, the WAC Corporal; he was also the first director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, famous for the successful Martian robot "Sojourner." Frank Malina was also a practicing artist. He was amazed that artists created so little artwork depicting the new landscapes we now see, thanks to telescopes, microscopes and robots that explore the ocean and space.

Conclusion: The work of today's space artists is laying the groundwork for the new space culture. In several hundred years when humans are living in colonies throughout our solar system, and the first explorers are leaving for nearby solar systems, these pioneers will be remembered as the first artists to incorporate the new space frontier into our expanding view of the world. Just as artists traveled to the Americas with the first explorers, so too are artists now accompanying the first astronauts and cosmonauts. Man's ongoing voyage of exploration continues.