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The cosmos as canvas
Interview Photography: Mark Asnin
The cosmos as canvas A growing movement of artists is creating art in zero gravity — both in parabolic flights and in outer space itself. The pioneer is Lowry Burgess. When one of his sculptures was launched into orbit in 1989, it became the first official non-scientific payload in space. Burgess is still pushing art’s boundaries, and will be challenging scientists to get involved at the 26th annual International Space Development Conference this week in Dallas, Texas. He talked to Amanda Gefter about war and our place in the cosmos What is space art all about?
The sky and space have always been a mirror to the Earth, and to the feelings of people on the Earth. Every culture has projected its deepest feelings onto the sky and space. Now that we’ve crossed the threshold of being able to send humans into space, we can explore what it means to project not just feelings, but human life itself, into space. Your sculpture Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture was the first to be put into space. Can you describe it?
It’s an extremely complex art project. I gathered water from the mouths of the 18 greatest rivers in the world and from geysers, glaciers, wells and springs all over the planet. I distilled them into pure water on the surface of the Dead Sea, then worked with chemists to add all the elements in the periodic table. Then I placed that water inside a cube that was sent into space. It is actually a cube inside a cube. The inner cube is a vacuum chamber, which floats in the water in the outer cube –
Profile Renowned space artist Lowry Burgess, former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a professor of art and a fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. For 27 years he has also been a fellow, senior consultant and adviser at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
52 | NewScientist | 26 May 2007
so the “everything” surrounds the “nothing”. I didn’t just drag something out of my attic and stuff it into space. The whole concept of the work required zero gravity. It’s about the release of everything and nothing into floating freedom: weightlessness. NASA understood that couldn’t be done other than by taking the work into space. After 93 orbits the cube was brought back to Earth and put in an underground shaft near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where it hovers in a permanent magnetic field. Was it difficult to convince NASA to do it?
Yes. They had never dealt with someone who wanted to fly a work of art in space and not disguise it as science. But we went back to the initial contract of the shuttle with the American people and they had promised a cultural mission. Then we had to develop nonscientific payload policies and non-scientific personnel policies, which took about six years. You can’t just go into space. It looks free up there but it’s highly controlled. I’ve heard astronauts talk about a feeling of not belonging to any particular culture, of being an individual without a context. Your work is so heavily laden with history and context.
I’m pulling together all that heaviness and letting it float free. Then I re-engage that disengaged piece. For example, I poured the waters from the cube back into a spring. I recorded the act of pouring them, turned the
sounds into radio waves and bounced them off the surface of the moon. It’s the idea that the pouring of the water would actually touch the moon. These works go on and on. How did you get involved in space art?
It was driven in the late 1960s by my resistance to the Vietnam war. I had studied south-east Asian anthropology so I knew the culture and history of Vietnam very well, and that war was as unthinkable as Iraq or more so. The question of what I was doing on Earth became very problematic. I didn’t know where I was in the world or in society. I think that drove me more and more into the sky. It was about, how do I locate myself in the cosmos? It was very existential. What are you working on now?
I’m preparing a work for very deep space, at the balance point between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, about 1.1 million light www.newscientist.com
spectacular. So we want to explore this whole spectrum, in a project called Data Flux. The idea is to get all the data from the plane – pressure, acceleration, temperature – plus all the physiological data from the artists who are flying, so on Earth we can see it all interacting. Why the fascination with zero gravity?
For me it’s the concept of release; this state of freedom. I think it’s different for each artist, but it has to do with the fact that both mind and body go into a very different condition in zero gravity. I’ve commonly heard people describe the experience of being inside out, of feeling that your body has no external boundary. That feeling seems to be addictive: anyone who goes into zero gravity wants to go again. I think all art confronts an individual with a situation in which their boundaries, both physical and mental, are redefined. The zero-gravity experience forces that redefinition on the artist, and the question is, where can that take us? Art is massively transformed by its context, and certainly the context is changed by the art. So there is going to be some very complex reciprocity once we have sustained human presence in outer space; I think many new forms of art will appear. Has it been difficult to get scientists involved in space art?
years away. The two spin around each other, and in the middle is a zero gravity point that is extremely enduring. I want to send radio waves to create an interference pattern at that point. I’d like to get it on its way by 2009. Although it’s going to take 1.1 million years to get there!
and he saw this as a natural extension of the work of Jackson Pollock. He thought the release of the paint would be similar to the way Pollock used gesture and distance and movement in his painting, although it became something very different. The paint went everywhere – even his own body became part of the canvas.
What about art done in zero-gravity conditions?
Now you and Pietronigro are working together?
These are works of art done during parabolic flight. My colleague Frank Pietronigro in San Francisco is leader of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, which facilitates parabolic flight projects for artists. Frank is interested in the relationship between art and its context, so for instance he went and painted in zero gravity
We want to look at the full spectrum of behaviour in a parabolic flight. So you’re not only doing works of art for the floating portion of the flight but also for the double gravity. In a single flight you’re going from weightlessness to hypergravity 14 to 30 times. Tape of zero-gravity flights is edited later to show only the floating parts, but I’m just as fascinated with the part where you get crushed into place. Suddenly when zero gravity emerges again you see people almost blooming, like they’re being reborn as they come out of the very dense pull. It’s
“It’s about the release of everything and nothing into floating freedom” www.newscientist.com
There’s a history of animosity and jealousy between the institutions of science and art, and it goes both ways. But individual scientists have been great. I’ve been working with scientists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon and they’ve been easy and fun. I’m looking for the common ground of creativity that unites all of us, and to build a new generation of people who are much more comfortable with interdisciplinary communication. What will you be talking about at the International Space Development conference?
The creation of a space arts institute. Frank and I are trying to get it going for summer 2009. We’ve been talking with the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and hopefully the conference will get critical players together. We want to bring young people together with older folks to explore cross-disciplinary issues and create a much friendlier culture between policy people, scientists and artists. If we could share our creativity more broadly we would wind up being more creative in our own fields. To me, science is a vast set of poems that I am creatively stimulated by. And some of the great scientists I know are very moved by the arts. ● 26 May 2007 | NewScientist | 53
The cosmos as canvas A growing movement of artists is creating art in zero gravity — both in parabolic flights and in outer space itself. The pioneer is Lowry Burgess. When one of his sculptures was launched into orbit in 1989, it became the first official non-scientific payload in space. Burgess is still pushing art’s boundaries, and will be challenging scientists to get involved at the 26th annual International Space Development Conference this week in Dallas, Texas. He talked to Amanda Gefter about war and our place in the cosmos What is space art all about?
The sky and space have always been a mirror to the Earth, and to the feelings of people on the Earth. Every culture has projected its deepest feelings onto the sky and space. Now that we’ve crossed the threshold of being able to send humans into space, we can explore what it means to project not just feelings, but human life itself, into space. Your sculpture Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture was the first to be put into space. Can you describe it?
It’s an extremely complex art project. I gathered water from the mouths of the 18 greatest rivers in the world and from geysers, glaciers, wells and springs all over the planet. I distilled them into pure water on the surface of the Dead Sea, then worked with chemists to add all the elements in the periodic table. Then I placed that water inside a cube that was sent into space. It is actually a cube inside a cube. The inner cube is a vacuum chamber, which floats in the water in the outer cube –
Profile Renowned space artist Lowry Burgess, former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a professor of art and a fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. For 27 years he has also been a fellow, senior consultant and adviser at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
52 | NewScientist | 26 May 2007
so the “everything” surrounds the “nothing”. I didn’t just drag something out of my attic and stuff it into space. The whole concept of the work required zero gravity. It’s about the release of everything and nothing into floating freedom: weightlessness. NASA understood that couldn’t be done other than by taking the work into space. After 93 orbits the cube was brought back to Earth and put in an underground shaft near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where it hovers in a permanent magnetic field. Was it difficult to convince NASA to do it?
Yes. They had never dealt with someone who wanted to fly a work of art in space and not disguise it as science. But we went back to the initial contract of the shuttle with the American people and they had promised a cultural mission. Then we had to develop nonscientific payload policies and non-scientific personnel policies, which took about six years. You can’t just go into space. It looks free up there but it’s highly controlled. I’ve heard astronauts talk about a feeling of not belonging to any particular culture, of being an individual without a context. Your work is so heavily laden with history and context.
I’m pulling together all that heaviness and letting it float free. Then I re-engage that disengaged piece. For example, I poured the waters from the cube back into a spring. I recorded the act of pouring them, turned the
sounds into radio waves and bounced them off the surface of the moon. It’s the idea that the pouring of the water would actually touch the moon. These works go on and on. How did you get involved in space art?
It was driven in the late 1960s by my resistance to the Vietnam war. I had studied south-east Asian anthropology so I knew the culture and history of Vietnam very well, and that war was as unthinkable as Iraq or more so. The question of what I was doing on Earth became very problematic. I didn’t know where I was in the world or in society. I think that drove me more and more into the sky. It was about, how do I locate myself in the cosmos? It was very existential. What are you working on now?
I’m preparing a work for very deep space, at the balance point between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, about 1.1 million light www.newscientist.com
spectacular. So we want to explore this whole spectrum, in a project called Data Flux. The idea is to get all the data from the plane – pressure, acceleration, temperature – plus all the physiological data from the artists who are flying, so on Earth we can see it all interacting. Why the fascination with zero gravity?
For me it’s the concept of release; this state of freedom. I think it’s different for each artist, but it has to do with the fact that both mind and body go into a very different condition in zero gravity. I’ve commonly heard people describe the experience of being inside out, of feeling that your body has no external boundary. That feeling seems to be addictive: anyone who goes into zero gravity wants to go again. I think all art confronts an individual with a situation in which their boundaries, both physical and mental, are redefined. The zero-gravity experience forces that redefinition on the artist, and the question is, where can that take us? Art is massively transformed by its context, and certainly the context is changed by the art. So there is going to be some very complex reciprocity once we have sustained human presence in outer space; I think many new forms of art will appear. Has it been difficult to get scientists involved in space art?
years away. The two spin around each other, and in the middle is a zero gravity point that is extremely enduring. I want to send radio waves to create an interference pattern at that point. I’d like to get it on its way by 2009. Although it’s going to take 1.1 million years to get there!
and he saw this as a natural extension of the work of Jackson Pollock. He thought the release of the paint would be similar to the way Pollock used gesture and distance and movement in his painting, although it became something very different. The paint went everywhere – even his own body became part of the canvas.
What about art done in zero-gravity conditions?
Now you and Pietronigro are working together?
These are works of art done during parabolic flight. My colleague Frank Pietronigro in San Francisco is leader of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, which facilitates parabolic flight projects for artists. Frank is interested in the relationship between art and its context, so for instance he went and painted in zero gravity
We want to look at the full spectrum of behaviour in a parabolic flight. So you’re not only doing works of art for the floating portion of the flight but also for the double gravity. In a single flight you’re going from weightlessness to hypergravity 14 to 30 times. Tape of zero-gravity flights is edited later to show only the floating parts, but I’m just as fascinated with the part where you get crushed into place. Suddenly when zero gravity emerges again you see people almost blooming, like they’re being reborn as they come out of the very dense pull. It’s
“It’s about the release of everything and nothing into floating freedom” www.newscientist.com
There’s a history of animosity and jealousy between the institutions of science and art, and it goes both ways. But individual scientists have been great. I’ve been working with scientists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon and they’ve been easy and fun. I’m looking for the common ground of creativity that unites all of us, and to build a new generation of people who are much more comfortable with interdisciplinary communication. What will you be talking about at the International Space Development conference?
The creation of a space arts institute. Frank and I are trying to get it going for summer 2009. We’ve been talking with the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and hopefully the conference will get critical players together. We want to bring young people together with older folks to explore cross-disciplinary issues and create a much friendlier culture between policy people, scientists and artists. If we could share our creativity more broadly we would wind up being more creative in our own fields. To me, science is a vast set of poems that I am creatively stimulated by. And some of the great scientists I know are very moved by the arts. ● 26 May 2007 | NewScientist | 53