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SPACE SOON
Art and Human Spaceflight
| TAKING CONTROL: Space Soon Symposium SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES |
Symposium Programme
Abstracts
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Lowry Burgess
Lowry Burgess has worked with outer space for the past 35 years. Among celebrated space artworks is his ‘Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture,’ as noted, the first ‘official’ non-scientific payload that was taken into outer space by the NASA Space shuttle Discovery in March 1989. He is Dean and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Distinguished Fellow of the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts and Society. He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT for 25 years.
http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu:16080/~burgess/
http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050210_spaceart.html
Garrett Finney
Garrett Finney is originally from Philadelphia and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. He is a licensed architect. He received a Bachelor’s Degree from Yale College and a Master’s Degree in Architecture from Yale University. In 1994 he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture and became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1995. He is currently practicing as an architect and designer. His practice includes consulting at NASA-JSC on Lunar Habitats, furniture design, house design and research into recreational vehicles, their uses and impacts. Until recently, he worked full time as the Senior Architect at the Habitability Design Center, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas where he was working on designs for the Habitation Module of the International Space Station.
In his own practice he has designed and built both one of a kind and production furniture, and has had residential and commercial clients. His work has been exhibited in Milan, Rome and New Haven. He is editor of issue number 29 of Perspecta, Yale’s Journal of Architecture. In collaboration with his sister, Martha Finney, he has designed and built houses which have been published in Fine Homebuilding magazine, and the books Small Houses For the Next Century, McGraw-Hill, and More Small Houses, Taunton Press. As an architect he has worked in Philadelphia, New York and Milan for a variety of firms, including Kohn, Pedersen, Fox Associates, Turner Brooks, and Maya Lin. He has worked as well in a variety of other disciplines, including blacksmith, industrial designer and carpenter. He has taught at the University of Kentucky as the John Russell Groves-Kentucky Housing Corporation Visiting Professor in Affordable Housing Research, the Rhode Island School of Design, Temple University and been an invited critic at Yale University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Carleton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has delivered lectures at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, University of Kentucky in Lexington, Columbia University in New York City, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and many others.
www.farostudio.net
Dr. Kevin Fong MRCP FRCA
Kevin Fong is a specialist registrar in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine and an honorary lecturer in physiology at University College London. He holds degrees in astrophysics (1993) and medicine (1998) from UCL and has worked with NASA at Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. His work focuses on the problems associated with protecting crews engaged in long duration missions.
In 2003 he was awarded a five-year fellowship by the UK's National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to allow him to continue his work with NASA. Kevin currently chairs the UK Space Biomedicine Group (UKSBG) and is due to return to Houston next year for a 6 month sabbatical with the Human Adaptation and Countermeasures group at Johnson Space Center.
Michelle Griffiths
Performance installations include:
‘Astral Traveller’ in Self Storage in association with Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno (1995); ‘The Physics of Escapism’ in Instantaneous, Beaconsfield (1998); ‘Hipparcos: The weight of the concept’ in post-neo-amateurism, Chisenhale Gallery (1998); ‘Re-entry: After Avalon’, The Enchanted Garden, SPACE studios/Big Chill’ ‘The Interrupted Journey’ Henie Onstat Art Centre Norway (1999); ‘The Little Mermaid’, Home (1999); ‘Particle Accelerator: Rumplestiltzkin’ Confederacy of Pleasures (2000); ‘The Proprietor’s Daughter (Trojan Horse), Parklight (2000); ‘The Probability Tree’, Realm of the Senses, Turku Art Museum, Finland (2000); ‘Two Maidens a-Milking’ a collaborative performance with Helena Bryant in ‘Art & Money’, in association with Home, Victoria & Albert Museum (2005).
“…Michelle Griffiths' Re-entry: After Avalon, where the artist became a living Pre-Raphaelite astronaut painting. At the top of a carved staircase you looked down 20 feet to an artificial pond where Griffiths, the woman who fell to water, lay submerged, lit in green and slowly masticating next to the protruding corner of her sunken spaceship. At the far edge of the pond, above a waterfall, Thomas Gray's Once Upon a Time projected montages of dancers and chapter headings like 'ELECTRICITY' onto the screen of shrubbery, perceptually flip-flopping between 2D image and 3D foliage.” Kodwo Eshun, reviewing Enchanted Garden
www.michellegriffiths.co.uk
Ronald Jones
Ronald Jones, an artist and critic, is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. He is guest professor of Communication Design at HfG in Karlsruhe, Germany and on the Visiting Faculty at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule Frankfurt, Germany. Before taking these appointments, he served as the first Provost at Art Center College of Design where he guided the design and implementation of a new transdisciplinary curriculum for the College. He came to Art Center from Columbia University, where he was Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, and Co-Director of the Interactive Design Lab. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Jones was Senior Critic at the School of Art, Yale University for nine years. He has also served on the faculty of The Royal Danish Academy of Art, Copenhagen, The Rhode Island School of Design, The School of Visual Arts, New York, among others.
Jones is represented by Metro Pictures and the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. He is a principle at o-b-o-k (ord, bilder, objekt and kunskap), an office for experience design he formed with Laurie Haycock Makela. o-b-o-k provides cross-discipline research, creative development, and experience design through the integration of writing, art, design, and history.
He holds a Certificate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, took the MFA degree from the University of South Carolina, and the Ph.D. in art history from Ohio University. He has delivered over two hundred lectures at universities, museums, and art and design schools including Harvard University, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons School of Design, DIA Center for the Arts, New York City, Royal College of Art, London, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Brown University, Akademie Der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, the Architectural Association, London, among others.
Jones contributes regularly to Art Forum and frieze and writes frequently on contemporary art for various publications including Art in America, Parkett, Zone, Flash Art. He is the author of numerous museum and exhibition catalogs most recently having written on David Salle, Elizabeth Peyton, Terry Winters, and Willem de Kooning.
A practicing artist Jones has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, and Cologne. Recent projects include garden designs -in Kosovo, Munster (for the Munster Sculpture Project) and “Aussendist,” a garden complex for the city of Hamburg, both in Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others.
His first opera “Falling and Waving” was produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Arts at Saint Ann’s in New York City in 1999. He is at work on a second opera titled “Moon Shot.” Dr. Jones has received numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and a Mellon Grant. In addition, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Lucent Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and sits on the boards of numerous cultural organizations including the Public Art Fund, and Artists Space.
London Fieldworks
Art partnership London Fieldworks was co-founded by Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson in 2000. Their multidisciplinary collaborative projects at the art science technology interface have reflected an ongoing enquiry into how the data of natural phenomena and human experience are interpreted and manifested in both science and art.
Their projects and installations have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Fort William Mountain Film Festival and the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Gilchrist was ARHC Fellow at Oxford Brookes University (2002-2005) and Joelson was ACE/AHRC Fellow at University of Leicester (2003-2004). She has recently been awarded a 3 year AHRC Fellowship to be undertaken at London South Bank University (Department of Science and Engineering).
Gilchrist was awarded first prize from the ICA/Toshiba Art and Innovation Award for the durational live-art installation, Divided by Resistance (1996). Gilchrist and Joelson were awarded Millennium Fellowships by the Royal Society and British Association for the Advancement of Science for their project Syzygy (1997-1999), a telematic artwork that took place simultaneously on an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland and at the ICA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts) London. Their project Polaria (2000-2002) involved a month of fieldwork in North East Greenland working with biomonitors and a spectroradiometer to collect data from arctic light and human physiology to create an interactive ‘virtual daylight chamber’.
In 2002, the artists were the recipients of an Arts Council International Fellowship at the Headlands Center for The Arts, Sausilito, California where they worked with researchers from the Space Sciences Lab at University of California, Berkeley to instigate the Little Earth project. As a prelude to Little Earth (2003-2005) - a collaboration with scientists from the Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group at the University of Leicester, New Zealand based composer Dugal McKinnon and author James Flint - London Fieldworks formally twinned two historic mountaintop observatories on Ben Nevis, Scotland and Haldde Mountain, Northern Norway.
SpaceBaby, their new project with Arts Catalyst for Space Soon is the first in a trilogy of works around the theme of hibernation.
To celebrate the Year of Highland Culture 2007 London Fieldworks are currently developing a large scale architectural work, Outlandia a sustainable assemblage of artist’s treehouse studios and fieldstation in Glen Nevis, Lochaber, Scotland which will host a series of international artist residencies from autumn 2007 onwards.
www.londonfieldworks.com
Aleksandra Mir
Artist, Aleksandra Mir was born in Lubin, Poland in 1967. A citizen of Sweden, she lives in NYC, USA and Palermo, Sicily. Selected solo shows and projects include: 'WELCOME Sometimes', Greengrassi Gallery, London (2005);
'Aeropuerto', Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona (2005); The World from Above, Greengrassi, London (2004); Naming Tokyo (part III), ICA, Philadelphia (2004); Happy Holidays, The Wrong Gallery, New York (2003); Naming Tokyo (part II), Swiss Institute, New York (2003); Plane Landing, Compton Verney House Trust, Warwickshire (2003); Welcome back to Earth, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St Gallen (2003) and First Woman on the Moon, Casco Projects, Utrecht (1999).
Group Shows include 'Space Is The Place', Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland (2006); 'The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe', Compton Verney (2006); 'Return To Space', Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2005); 'Whitney Biennial 2004', NYC (2004) and 'State of Play', Serpentine Gallery, London (2004)
www.aleksandramir.info
Judith Palmer
Judith Palmer is a writer, critic and broadcaster. She is currently Critical Writer in Residence at Manchester Institute for Research & Innovation in Art & Design (miriad), Senior Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written extensively about art and literature for the Independent specialising in interdisciplinary and collaborative practice, and is author of a book about contemporary artists, 'Private Views, Artists Working Today' (Serpent's Tail, 2004). Recent essays include ‘Echoes of Destruction’ in A Record of Fear (Commissions East/National Trust, 2006); ‘Magnificent Rudeness’ in Earth, Air, Sky & Water (Wordsworth Trust, 2006); and ‘Achieving Levity’ in Zero Gravity: a cultural users guide (Arts Catalyst, 2005). Other essays on art and space have appeared in publications including Independent Saturday Review, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times, Printmaking Today and New Statesman.
She regularly presents programmes on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 exploring our cultural relationship with the natural world; and continues to pursue research interests into the medical ethnobotany of the British Isles. In 2003 she created the installation ‘The Field Hospital’ at The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, in collaboration with Sally Hampson and Tim Cole; as well as a large-scale oral-history survey about British domestic medicine for the Ethnomedica archive. ’Cardio-Active’, a collaborative investigation into the science and folklore of the foxglove (with visual artist Pauline Aitken and University of Cambridge Multi-Imaging Dept) won a Wellcome Trust sci-art award.
She has often worked with The Arts Catalyst. In 2001 she was part of the MIR001 trip to Star City – the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training centre, Russia. She was a member of the Cultural Utilisation of the ISS Study Team and participant in the cultural utilisation workshop at the European Space Agency, Noordwijk (2005). She is convener and chair of the Space Soon Symposium and Talks.
Sarah Jane Pell
Sarah Jane Pell is an Australian new media performance artist and ADAS Pt2 occupational diver. She is Director of the ARTiA Aquabatics Research Team.
www.sarahjanepell.com
Frank Pietronigro
Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and author. He is the first American painter to create "drift paintings" as a part of Research Project Number 33: Investigating the Creative Process in a Microgravity Environment developed as a part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Program created in collaboration with the San Francisco Art Institute, the Texas and California Space Grant Consortia. The artist’s body floated within a three-dimensional painting that he created in zero gravity aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet. He is Co-Founder and Project Director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, an international Space Art organization dedicated to fostering greater access for artists to space flight technology and zero gravity through the creation of international partnerships with space explorers, arts organizations, corporations and leading universities. In 2004, Pietronigro was appointed Associate Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.pietronigro.com
http://www.zgac.org
Tim Otto Roth
Tim Otto Roth (b. 1974) is a German artist living in Cologne and in Oppenau/ Black Forest. Since 2002 he has realised his works as large interventions in the public space. He has already received numerous awards, including the first German Light Art Award „Lux.us“ and the “International Media Art Award 2004” from the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Roth’s cosmic ray research began in the winter of 2004/05. His first cosmic ray project was a cooperation with the KASCADE experiment, transmitting the cosmic particle shower pictures arriving at the detectors at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in near realtime to the Art Façade in Munich. This was a unique night-time art display mounted on the façade of the Serviceplan building in downtown Munich, Germany. Above the façade’s blinking lights, the 76 panels were illuminated by leading experiments from the world’s largest high energy physics institutes - the Fermilab, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the SLAC and the Japanes KEK in Tsukuba. Between these particle physics experiments and two further astronomical observations, Roth’s cosmic ray experiment in Karlsruhe functioned as a missing link between the view into the depths of the universe and the view into the depths of matter.
In spring 2005, he realised a further project at the High Altitude Research Station Jungfraujoch. At the “Top of Europe” in the central Swiss alps, the artist got in touch with the current cosmic neutron monitoring, and explored the station’s history of cosmic ray research.
www.imachination.net/next100/jungfrau.html
www.kunstfassade.de/tor
Related publications: Leonardo Volume 39, Issue 1 / February 2006 <http://www.photograms.net/press/kunstfassade/lightfacade_leonardo39.pdf> (MIT Press <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=31140> ):
"A Walk on the Retinas of the Extreme Sciences: A Minimalist Concept for an Internet-Based Light Art Art Façade in Munich"
Gro Mjeldheim Sandal
Gro Mjeldheim Sandal is professor in psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway. Since the early 1990s, she has been the Principal Investigator of large scale international research projects funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and focused on psychological reactions during human spaceflights. These projects have included a number of simulation studies of multinational crews isolated in hyperbaric chambers and personnel operating in other extreme environments (Antarctic research stations, polar crossing, and military settings). She is currently leading one of the first psychological studies of resident crews at the International Space Station (ISS) in collaboration with colleagues working for the Russian Space Agency (RSA). Her recent research has focused on the implications of individual and cultural differences in values for efficient co-working among crews in space as well as among ground-based personnel. A major aim is to gain knowledge that can be used for selection, training and in-flight support.
Semiconductor
Semiconductor make Sound Films which reveal our physical world in flux; cities in motion, shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt have been exploring many processes of digital animation to produce experimental films and live animation. These works are exhibited in galleries, festivals, cinemas and biennials worldwide. Recent exhibitions include; Venice Biennale, Chicago Film Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Inhabituel; Milan, Ars Electronica; Austria.
www.semiconductorfilms.com
Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith is English although he was born in New York and lived in California until he was in his early teens. He watched the moon landings on TV in his San Francisco home.
He has written for the Melody Maker, the Face, the Sunday Times, and the Observer where he has written on the KLF, death row, Damien Hirst, Jeff Bezos and Bianca Jagger. He currently lives with his family in Norfolk.
He is the author of Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth, a book about the lives of the men who walked on the moon.
Paul Spudis
Paul D Spudis is a Principal Professional Staff member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland and Visiting Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. He is a geologist who received his education at Arizona State University (B.S., 1976; Ph. D., 1982) and at Brown University (Sc.M., 1977) and specializes in research on the processes of impact and volcanism on the planets.
He has served on NASA’s Lunar and Planetary Sample Team (LAPST), which advises allocations of lunar samples for scientific research, the Lunar Exploration Science Working Group (LEXSWG), that devised scientific strategies of lunar exploration, and the Planetary Geology Working Group, which monitors overall directions in the planetary research community. He has been a member of the Committee for Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), an advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Synthesis Group, a White House panel that in 1990-1991, analyzed a return to the Moon to establish a base and the first human mission to Mars.
He was Deputy Leader of the Science Team for the Department of Defense Clementine mission to the Moon in 1994 and is the Principal Investigator of an imaging radar experiment on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission, to be launched to the Moon in 2007. He served as a member of the President’s Commission on the Implementation of U. S. Space Exploration Policy, whose report was issued June, 2004 and in September 2004, was presented with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for his work on that body. He is the recipient of the 2006 Von Karman Lectureship in Astronautics, awarded by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers and three books, including The Once and Future Moon, a book for the general public in the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System series, and (with Ben Bussey) The Clementine Atlas of the Moon, published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press.
Ion Sorvin
Ion Sorvin established N55 together with his partner Ingvil Aarbakke, to make experiments for living, function and art. Ingvil died in 2005, and Space on Earth Station is dedicated to her memory.
“N55 is an arts collective that aims to inspire public initiatives and events. Based in Copenhagen, the group's ventures are developed as a series of "Manuals," focusing on everyday aspects of living as a platform for dialogue. The Micro Dwellings system is one such project, exploring the malleability of our lifestyles versus the inflexibility of traditional housing. Micro Dwellings is a moveable, modular system which can be configured in an infinite number of ways due to its geometry. They can be built onto existing construction, submerged, or mounted on wheels to create the basis for personalized social settings. The system allows for changes that might occur in lifestyle, such as having children, separation, or family stays. The system is capable of growing, shrinking, and dividing, mimicking a natural cellular organism.
While the Micro Dwellings system represents a simplified and fragmented version of the domicile, it does provide for ultimate flexibility. Additionally, an underlying structure for social community is created, which is a prime objective for N55. Many of the N55 projects revolve around community involvement and a creative use of surroundings.
Other projects include City Farming Plant Modules which allow city dwellers to grow plants and gardens in any available space - including pavements. Barmobile is a portable bar station which makes a local meeting and gathering venue available anywhere. Suspended Platform is a lightweight system that provides shelter using existing structures such as trees or buildings for support.”
www.n55.dk
Nicola Triscott
Nicola Triscott is founder and Director of the Arts Catalyst.
www.artscatalyst.org
Neal White
Neal White’s work often relates to knowledge-based institutions (in terms of historical, academic, technological or scientific enquiry). Recently, he has been working with The Henry Moore Institute, O+I (formerly APG), John Latham and an ongoing residency at the National Institute for Medical Research. In 2001 he was Artist in Residence, Pfizer Research and Discovery Centre, and in 1999, Artist in Residence at Human Genome Mapping Project UK Resource.
Neal White was formerly the co-founder of internationally renown and award winning art, design and software group, Soda. After setting the company up in 1996, he acted as Creative Director before leaving to pursue his own practice in 2002. He is Senior Lecturer in Critical Practices, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.
For the Arts Catalyst he has created work for CleanRooms at the Natural History Museum and Artists Airshow, Farnborough.
www.nealwhite.org
