By FRANK ROSE
If you’re an astronaut
aboard the International Space Station, you spend much of your time running
science experiments. Among the jobs for Thomas Pesquet, a 39-year-old Frenchman
currently there on a six-month stint: using virtual reality to gauge the effects
of zero gravity on his hand-eye coordination, trying out a suit designed to
keep weightlessness from stretching out his spine, analyzing the microbes in
his water and directing a robot in the Netherlands from about 240 miles up. In
his spare time, he posts photos on Twitter and Instagram of what’s passing
beneath him: Mount Etna erupting, the artificial islands of Dubai, the
Australian Outback, the entire country of Denmark.
Last month, however, there
was a more unusual item on Mr. Pesquet’s agenda. Working with the earthbound
artist Eduardo Kac, he created an artwork in space. It was a simple piece:
nothing more than could be done with two sheets of paper and a pair of
scissors. “Since the goal was to be born in space, it had to be created with
materials that were already in the space station,” Mr. Kac (pronounced katz)
explained in a telephone interview from his home in suburban Oak Park, Ill.
Transporting art materials by rocket ship was not in the plan.
The artwork — a piece of
paper cut into an M, and another piece of paper rolled into a tube and stuck
through the middle of the M — might look a bit silly on Earth, where gravity
would accentuate its flimsiness. But floating weightlessly in the space
station, it looks fragile, even magical — not unlike the planet beyond.
Viewed with a certain
amount of imagination, the paper construction can be said to spell “moi.” Mr.
Kac, a professor of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, means this not as an individual “me” but in the collective sense: His
“moi” stands for all of us. The piece itself is called “Inner Telescope,” for
reasons that become clear only when you look through the O formed by the paper
tube and view a tiny portion of Earth. “We point a telescope to the stars,” he
said. “But this is a telescope that from the stars we point to ourselves.”
Mr. Kac’s artwork was made
possible by the Space Observatory, an office of France’s National Center for
Space Studies that focuses on the cultural aspect of space exploration.
Beginning Friday, March 24, the observatory is hosting its annual celebration
of art and space at the center’s headquarters in central Paris, just opposite
Les Halles. Among the participants will be Mr. Kac, who will show a 12-minute
art video of the paper cutout being assembled and floating through the space
station.
“It’s a simple, powerful work, evocative of
language and poetry,” Gérard Azoulay, the director of the Space Observatory,
said by email in French. The contrast between the humble materials required to
make it and “the ultra-technological context in which it was realized
intensifies its emotional power,” he said. “And it’s only meaningful in a state
of weightlessness.” Outside the Earth’s gravity, it can move freely, he added.
This is hardly the first
time Mr. Kac has done something out of the ordinary. In the 1990s, after
graduating from college in his native Rio de Janeiro and earning an M.F.A. at
the Art Institute, he made a name for himself as a progenitor of “bio art,”
meaning art made with living matter. For his 1999 work “Genesis,” he created a
so-called “artist’s gene” by writing a sentence from the Book of Genesis first
in the dots and dashes of Morse code and then in the four-letter alphabet of
DNA, creating an artificial gene that was subsequently incorporated into
bacteria. By shining short-wavelength ultraviolet light on the bacteria,
viewers online were able to alter its genetic code. When that was translated
back into Morse code and then into English, a mutation occurred in the sentence
from the Bible.
The following year, Mr. Kac
enlisted scientists at the French National Institute of Agronomic Research to
splice a genetic sequence that produces green fluorescent protein into the DNA
of an albino rabbit. The result was “GFP Bunny,” a white rabbit that glowed
green under blue light. The bunny, also known as Alba, was one of many such
lab-generated creatures. Though the process that created her is now widely used
in medical research and the scientists whose work made it possible were eventually
awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the idea that this could be art generated
considerable controversy at the time. Mr. Kac considers the whole thing
hypocritical, given that painters have been sealing their canvases with rabbit
skin glue for centuries. “Behind every da Vinci, Velázquez, Goya or Picasso,”
he said, “there are countless dead rabbits.”
Mr. Kac’s focus on
transgenics — the transfer of new genes into existing organisms — has long been
matched by a fascination with escaping gravity. In 2007, he published “Space
Poetry,” a manifesto in which he called for writing “that requires and explores
weightlessness.” In Western languages, he points out, you read from left to
right, in others from right to left. But almost universally, you read from top
to bottom. As with writing, so with art. “Look at the splatter paintings of
Pollock,” he said. “The entire history of art has operated under an unspoken
guiding force, which is gravity. So I started to ask myself in the ’80s, what
if we could remove this restraint?”
Other countries, it is safe
to say, were not falling all over themselves to support space poetry. But Mr.
Azoulay, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Space Studies — known by
the French acronym CNES — had founded the Space Observatory in 2000 as a
“laboratory of the arts and sciences.” The idea, he said, was “to encourage the
world of culture to create, in addition to stories of science and history and
politics, stories of space.”
There is, of course, no
shortage of space stories, from H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” (1898) to
“Star Wars” (1977) to last year’s “Arrival.” But for the most part, Mr. Azoulay
said, “directors and screenwriters use their imagination to construct a story
and then try to give it credibility by tapping into the available literature in
magazines or on the internet, or by interviewing experts,” as Ridley Scott did
for “The Martian.” A film like “Hidden Figures,” based on a little-known,
real-life story, is closer to what Mr. Azoulay has in mind.
To that end, he has opened
the archives of CNES and even established an artists in residence program.
There are 10 or so artists on the roster at the moment. Among them is Bertrand
Dezoteux, whose recent video “Waiting for Mars” used marionettes to portray
astronauts who in 2010 and 2011 spent 520 days in an isolation facility in
Moscow on a simulated mission to Mars, and the novelist Christine Montalbetti,
who published a book last fall about Sandra Magnus, a NASA astronaut who was on
the final mission of the United States space shuttle program.
It was as an artist in
residence several years ago that Mr. Kac started developing “Inner Telescope.”
To him, a key aspect of the project is “how this work speaks to a future that
has yet to be invented” — 30 years from now, when space travel could be as
common as air travel is today, he said.
What will this future be
like? “Imagine we find ourselves floating — it’s going to be an amazing
sensation. Looking at the Earth will be amazing. But by the third day, you’re
going to start asking other kinds of questions. I wonder, what can you do in
space that you cannot do on Earth? What would space cuisine be like? What would
space theater be like? What would space poetry be like, in terms of developing
something that is truly unique to that environment? Because now we’re talking
about the cultural dimension of space in a different sense” — not how space
affects culture on Earth, but how culture will evolve in space.
At 55, Mr. Kac is unlikely
to go to space himself, and when he started talking with Mr. Azoulay, it was
anyone’s guess when another French astronaut would go. Mr. Pesquet had long
dreamed of space travel, but at the time he was an airline pilot, flying the
Airbus A320 passenger jet for Air France. In 2009, however, he was selected for
the European Space Agency’s training program, and in 2014 he was assigned to a
mission on the International Space Station. Mr. Kac was introduced to him a
year later at the Paris Air Show. In 2016, they met again to rehearse the
operation — how to cut the paper, how to record the experience on video — at
the European Astronaut Center outside Cologne, Germany. “I trained him,” Mr.
Kac said, “and he trained me.”
Mr. Pesquet — who jogs,
sails, skis, plays basketball and squash, enjoys mountain biking and has a
black belt in judo — is clearly more jock than artist, though he does play the
saxophone. Still, he has taken to the “Inner Telescope” project with evident
enthusiasm. In November, shortly before blasting off on a Soyuz rocket from
Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on the steppes of Kazakhstan — the only spaceport
capable of sending astronauts to the International Space Station — he took a
moment to describe his mission for posterity. His choice of words was perhaps
inevitable: “It will be a small step for man,” he said, “and a giant leap for
art.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/arts/design/eduardo-kac-inner-telescope-space.html?_r=0
