Part of the Specimens to Superhumans series curated with Shape

Labyrinth of Living Exhibits considered specimens and curiosities through infiltrating and responding to the exotic and disturbing collection of London’s Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. The audience had the chance to explore the displays while encountering four simultaneous site-specific performances curated by Aaron Williamson and commissioned by Shape and The Arts Catalyst to respond to the museum's permanent collection: Aaron Williamson - Specimen Mirror, Sinéad O'Donnell - Who's afraid of the big bad wolf, Brian Catling - Out of its Depth and Katherine Araniello - Bipap I (Living Experiment). This was followed by a panel discussion. Artists Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello, were joined on the panel by Brian Hurwitz, D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts at Kings College, and Sam Alberti, Director of the Hunterian Museum, for a discussion about the historical representation of disability and contemporary approaches taken by the medical community, chaired by the Richard Hollingham.

Living Exhibits

The 'living exhibits' were performances by disabled artists commissioned expressly to respond to the museum's permanent collection and will be presented by Katherine Araniello, Brian Catling, Sinéad O'Donnell and Aaron Williamson.

Katherine Araniello uses subversive humour and wit in performances and films that address the social issues surrounding disability.  The majority of her work have been short films and video blogs. In addition to this, she has staged performance pieces as part of the collective the Disabled Avant-Garde with Aaron Williamson. Her works are continued investigative and experimental observations that either highlight the tragedy and pity implicit in medical model representations of disability or present a completely alternative picture of physical difference.  The prime focus is to subvert and parody complex contemporary issues which include assisted suicide, media representation and body aesthetics. Using a variety of media including film, performance and digital prints Araniello transforms these multifarious and serious issues to make works that are humorous and playful with a critical edge.

In 2010 she was awarded an Arts Admin bursary and is currently working on a one-act comedy performance as a potential vehicle in which to expand and develop her ongoing concern with the contemporary enthusiasm for Assisted Suicide. http://araniello-art.com

Brian Catling is a poet, sculptor and performance artist, who is currently working in video and live work. He has been commissioned to make solo installations and performances in many countries including; Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Holland, Norway, Germany, Greenland and Australia. His recent solo show Antix at Matt’s Gallery drew much critical acclaim. Four years ago he founded the international performance group, The Wolf In The Winter, whose most recent manifestation was at The South London Gallery. His video work moves between gallery installation and narrative films made in collaboration with Tony Grisoni. Their most recent work, The Cutting, was released last year. They also produce the no holds barred Cabaret Melancolique.

Catling’s permanent monument for the site of execution at the Tower of London was unveiled in 2007. Eight books of Catling’s poetry have been published and his work has been included in many anthologies. He is professor of fine art at The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College. http://briancatling.com 

Originally from Dublin and based in Belfast since 1995, Sinéad O'Donnell’s performance practice is nomadic and patterns of travel have broadened her cultural perceptions and influenced her artistic sensibilities regarding time and space. She is highly active in the Belfast performance art scene working with local organisations to foster performance art activity and support emerging artists. The critical and artistic core of her solo work explores identity through immediate and mediated encounters with territory and the territorial. Recent performances have been presented at the National Review of Live Art Glasgow 2010, Art No.11 experimental residency Japan 2010, ArTrend performance art festival Taiwan 2009, Shelter 209 Israel 09, My land performance art festival Croatia 09, Glassbox exhibition space University of Ulster Belfast 09, and Paves, Toynbee Studios London, 09.

O'Donnell has also applied her skills and experiences in the development of an international curatorial practice that enables exchange between local and international artists. Most recently, she has curated ‘CHAOS’ with the arts organisation Bbeyond, commissioning 10 Canadian artists to create and produce live work for a week long event in Belfast, 2010. http://www.sineadodonnell.com

Over the last 15 years Aaron Williamson has created over 200 performances and video works in many countries: in Greenland, Japan, US, China, South America, Taiwan and throughout Europe. He completed a Doctorate on performance and writing at the University of Sussex, (1997). His many Awards include a 3-Year AHRC Fellowship at the University Central England, (2004 - 07); the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at Oxford University and the British School at Rome, (2001 – 02); the Cocheme Fellowship at Byam Shaw, University of London (2008 – 09). He won the ‘Artist of the Year’ award from FACT in Liverpool, (2007) and was the Adam Reynolds Bursarist at Spike Island, Bristol for a residency between February to April 2010.

Profoundly deaf, Aaron Williamson is the founder of the disability artist’s collective 15mm Films and is one half of the satirical ‘Disabled Avant-Garde’ with Katherine Araniello. A retrospective of Williamson’s video works, ‘The Bell Clapper & Bestiary’, was exhibited by Spike Island, Bristol, in 2010. A monograph, ‘Aaron Williamson: Performance/ Video/ Collaboration’ was published by Live Art Development Agency in 2008 and a compilation DVD ‘Quick Clips and Short Cuts’ in 2011. http://www.aaronwilliamson.org

Partners

Shape,  Hunterian Museum

Funders

Funded by a Wellcome Trust People Award and Arts Council England.

The Arts Catalyst presents KOSMICA - a regular series of galactic gatherings bring together people from across art, science and society interested in sharing cultural ideas about space. 

Every KOSMICA is unique: bringing together the cosmically curious and culturally quirky space community for a social mix of art–space programmes.  The evening might include a film screening, performance or live music alongside an informal presentation, short talk or debate about 'alternative' and cultural uses of space.
KOSMICA events are usually held at The Arts Catalyst in London, but are sometimes held elsewhere, including Liverpool, Paris and beyond.  To find out more about future events and watch archive video footage checkout www.artscatalyst.org/kosmica or look us up on Facebook.

A series of events exploring contemporary issues around biomedical science, disability and ethics, and how these are explored, represented and critiqued in art.

Specimens to Superhumans was a series of four events curated by The Arts Catalyst and Shape.  The events provided creative opportunities to show the work of and to provide mentoring, development and networking opportunities for disabled artists.

Labyrinth of Living Exhibits

Labyrinth of Living Exhibits considered specimens and curiosities through infiltrating and responding to the exotic and disturbing collection of London’s Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. With Aaron Williamson, Sinéad O'Donnell, Brian Catling and Katherine Araniello. 

Alternative Ways of Thinking

At a time when the media frequently feature stories about screening for or even ‘curing’ autism, presenting it as an affliction or disease, this event explored and celebrated the special qualities of the autistic mind. With Simon Baron-Cohen, Jon Adams, Gabriel Hardistry-Miller and Ben Connors.

Benedict Phillips unleashed his dyslexic side in his performance piece 3D Thinking in a 2D World.

"All that happened to us..."

An event exploring the implications of the biomechanics of ageing for contemporary dance practice with Ann Dickie, Anna Bergström, Trevor Mathison, Professor Raymond Lee, Dr Siobhan Strike and Dr Jin Luo.

Bionic People

A two-day practical workshop with award-winning filmmaker John Williams creating short films that imaginatively address themes of disability, bioethics and prosthetics. This practical and inspiring two-day workshop gave disabled artists who already work with film/video and disabled emerging filmmakers an opportunity to explore and extend their work in these media.

Event Details

Labyrinth of Living Exhibits

Hunterian Museum, London 12 May 2011

Labyrinth of Living Exhibits considered specimens and curiosities through infiltrating and responding to the exotic and disturbing collection of London’s Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. The audience had the chance to explore the displays while encountering four simultaneous site-specific performances curated by Aaron Williamsion and commissioned by Shape and The Arts Catalyst to respond to the museum's permanent collection: Aaron Williamson, Sinéad O'Donnell, Brian Catling and Katherine Araniello. This was followed by a panel discussion. Artists Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello, were joined on the panel by Brian Hurwitz, D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts at Kings College, and Sam Alberti, Director of the Hunterian Museum, for a discussion about the historical representation of disability and contemporary approaches taken by the medical community, chaired by the Richard Hollingham.

Full-length panel discussion could be seen in the videos below:

Alternative Ways of Thinking

Cheltenham Science Festival, 10 June 2011

Exploring the Autistic Mind 

At a time when the media frequently feature stories about screening for or even ‘curing’ autism, presenting it as an affliction or disease, this event explores the special qualities of the autistic mind. Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre, discusses creativity and the autistic mind with artist and geologist, Jon Adams, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, Gabriel Hardistry-Miller, a non-verbal young man with autism who, with artist Ben Connors, runs a music, performance and poetry club.

Gabriel & Ben's video- How We Met can be viewed here:

Benedict Phillips, 3D Thinkers in a 2D World

In this humorous and thought-provoking performance, artist Benedict Phillips unleashes his dyslexic side as ‘The DIV’ highlighting and examining our presumptions about intelligence, communication and perception, unravelling the numerous misconceptions surrounding dyslexia and presenting the unusual advantages it brings.

"All that happened to us..."

Roehampton University Dance Faculty, London, Thursday 22 September 2011

An event exploring the implications of the biomechanics of ageing for contemporary dance practice. 

 While traditional dance science looks at how to enable an elite dancer to achieve perfection in both performance and aesthetics, this participative event will seek to explore what we can learn from the science of ageing about how a disabled or older dancer’s body works and what they need in order to perform to full capacity and to unlock their body’s full potential.For both older and disabled dancers, achieving elite standards may be neither possible nor what they are striving for, and this event explored the nuances between the social model of disability and the medical model of ageing, to see what common ground emerges.

The collaborative event, hosted by the University, was led by choreographers Ann Dickie, Director of From Here to Maturity Dance Company and Anna Bergström, Associate Artist at Candoco Dance Company, audio and digital artist, Trevor Mathison. Drawing from expertise across Roehampton University, Professor Raymond Lee and his colleagues Dr Siobhan Strike and Dr Jin Luo from the Active Ageing Unit at Life Sciences Department also participated in the event. We are grateful for the support of Roehampton University’s Dance Faculty and for the input from Louise Portlock and Frank McDaniels from Gloucestershire Dance.

Bionic People

Two-day filmmaking workshop for disabled artists and filmmakers, part of DadaFest,  30-31 July 2012

John Williams, a writer/director with over 10 years experience, whose films combine live action, animation and visual effects, engagingly dealing with highly sensitive subjects, including mental health (‘Robots’), young children dealing with the death of a friend (‘Hibernation’) and a child’s complex feelings towards his robotic dialysis machine (‘Paraphernalia’), led the two day practical workshop.
Gary Thomas from Disability Arts Online attended the workshop and created this film.

Partners

Shape, Hunterian Museum, Cheltenham Science Festival, Roehampton University, DadaFest

Funders

Funded by a Wellcome Trust People Award, and Arts Council England

SPACE SOON A special concert curated by Resonance FM

Is it possible to have a clean death in a vacuum? We're All Going To Die was an operatic, radiophonic concatentation of space ephemera and near-Earth collision paranoia, hosted by Resonance104.4fm. It featured The Bohman Brothers, Ken Hollings, Tom McCarthy, DJ Original Bear, the Resonance Radio Orchestra, DJ Rocket 88, Jonny Trunk and Lembit Opik MP. Resonance FM broadcast live from the Roundhouse throughout Space Soon.

A day of art and flying in and around Europe's largest wind tunnel.

Airshow used the then deserted research facility where supersonic flight was developed and the ghosts of sixties rocket projects linger. Artists’ installations and transmissions were sited in the abandoned wind tunnels, test tanks and life-size helicopter flight simulators. There was a programme of flying events presented by artists and guided tours of the wind tunnels organised by the Farnborough Air Sciences and led by the engineers who formerly worked in the facility.

A highlight of day was Simon Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle no.6, a full-scale chair suspended beneath a weather balloon with a camera and transmitter. This apparatus was released from a launch pad - on an extremely windy day - and rapidly rose above the earth ultimately into the blackness of the stratosphere on the edge of space. With the naked eye, the audience on earth at Farnborough watched the balloon and chair recede and disappear into the sky, but they were then immediately able to follow the rest of the journey on a giant screen via a live video downlink from the escape vehicle.

Zina Kaye demonstrated the use of the Observatine UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), a petrol-powered unmanned surveillance airplane created with onboard camera and computer, controlled via an internet browser. The airplane took off from the Farnborough airfield runway, and the audience were able to follow the airplane’s flight by sight in the skies as well as on monitors. 
Miles Chalcraft’s Tear-Rain was a two-stage, 6-foot rocket aimed to deliver a year’s worth of tears over the assembled audience (as a small burst of rain at the end of another bad summer). The momentary cloudburst was to be observed with a rocket's eye view by an onboard wireless camera and simultaneously relayed to a large TV monitor. 

Luke Jerram’s Ghost Plane was a site-specific new commission: an apparition in the wind tunnel. A ghostly spitfire summoned up by eddying air currents shimmering across a reflective bed of mercury, Ghost Plane echoed the aircraft tested at Farnborough and the engineers who once used mercury to measure the shifting air pressure in the wind tunnels. Stefan Gec’s Celestial Vault, commissioned for MIR: Art in Variable Gravity, is a video installation recorded in the giant centrifuge at Moscow’s Star City cosmonaut training centre. It was sited in the return chamber of the large wind tunnel.

Tim Knowles was commissioned to create a site-specific balloon drawing machine, which produced randomised wind drawings by wind-blown balloons. Installed in the sonic wind tunnel, Flow Motion’s Dissolve. a digital audio installation, takes as its starting point Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Louise K Wilson created Loop, a site-specific video and sound installation using footage shot from the cockpit of a Slingsby Firefly of a repeated aerobatic manoeuvre performed in the skies above Northumbria in August 2004

Marko Peljhan gave a talk about his ongoing collaboration with the Aerosonde corporation, which manufactures long-distance UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for use in environmental surveys in oceans and inhospitable terrain such as Antarctica.

To conclude the day, Anne Bean literally created a spectacular drawing for the sky, using balloons, parachute flares and small rockets, in collaboration with pyrotechnicians Mark Anderson and Nick Sales.

External links:

YouTube 1st International Artists Airshow, 2nd International Artists Airshow

A seminar exploring the role of artists in examining the activities of big business

Corporate Personae was a seminar on corporate social responsibility and the role artists and activists, such as Platform, The Yes Men and With, play in “identity correction” and interrogating the activities of big business. The event featured a performance by artist Lucy Panesar and launched Arts Catalyst/SCAN's Dark Places programme.

Speakers

Dan Gretton (Platform), David Leitner (Cambridge University), Lucy Panesar (Artist), Felicity Mukherjee (NFHC International Inc), Alasdair Hopwood (WITH).

Interspecies uses artistic and participatory strategies to stimulate dialogue and debate, showing artists in contact with real animals and negotiating a new power relationship, questioning the way we view our interactions with animals during Darwin's anniversary year.

Interspecies asks: Can artists work with animals as equals? If not, what is the current state of the human-animal relationship? It has recently been shown that humans are closer to the higher primates than previously thought, with chimpanzee and gorilla behaviour reflecting politics, deception and even possibly creativity. What does this mean to the way we see ourselves as one species inhabiting a planet in crisis?

This exhibition centres around a durational work by Kira O'Reilly and draws together projects by Nicolas Primat and other artists who question the one-sided manipulation of non-human life-forms for art, and have tried to enter the animals' point of view as a fundamental part of their practice. It has to some extent been inspired by Donna Haraway'sWhen Species Meet but was triggered by discussions with the late Nicolas Primat.

The artists

Nicolas Primat specialised in directly working with monkeys and apes in collaboration with primatologists. In Portrait de Famille, he is playfully swarmed by a tribe of squirrel monkeys, in Demo Bonobo, he established a relationship via sexual signals with a group of Bonobo apes and in The Making of Les Petits Hommes Vers he and his colleagues make a science fiction film with a group of monkeys.

Kira O'Reilly's durational performance Falling Asleep With A Pig. The artist and pig (Deliah) cohabit a living space, partially viewable by the public for 72 hours. At some point the pig and artist fall asleep. The work addresses the ethics of human and animal interaction, acknowledging the implicit ambivalences and violence in the appropriation of animals as a resource.

Antony Hall's Enki Experiment 4 allows visitors to Interspecies to communicate with an electric fish on the same level, avoiding the use of language, instead stimulating a shared empathy through a physical connection. 

Ruth Maclennan's films Harry and Three short films on Hawks and Men explore the relationship between a bird of prey and the human being who trains it, capturing the rapt gaze of hunter and bird, recalling ancient ideas of shape-shifting and shamanic transformations. 

Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends juxtaposes footage of baboons taken in the field with a re-enactment by human actors, shot film noir style in a bar in Los Angeles. A tale of lust, jealousy, sex and violence transpires simultaneously in non-human and human worlds.

Beatriz da Costa's work PigeonBlog proposes an alternative way to participate in environmental air pollution data-gathering through equipping urban homing pigeons with GPS-enabled sensing devices. PigeonBlog is intended as a social experiment between humans and animals.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson's Radio Animal involves a specially designed caravan in which the artists to travel to various locations in the UK to gather material from people about their relationship to animals. They are particularly interested in animals that are considered ‘unwelcome’ visitors but have for whatever reason found their way into what we may consider our own territories.  Animal Radio is a Story Gallery, Lancaster commission funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Events

Interspecies included two symposia chaired by Rob La Frenais:

Non-Human Primates with Sarah-Jane Vick - primatologist and psychologist; Patrick Munck - artist, videographer and collaborator with Nicolas Primat; Rachel Mayeri - artist

Animals, Humans and Power with Giovanni Aloi - editor Antennae; Ruth Maclennan - artist; Helen Macdonald, author of Falcon; Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir; Karen Knorr - artist and photographer

Rachel Mayeri also held two Primate Cinema workshops on How to Act like an Animal as part of the exhibition

Links to artists' websites

Kira O'Reilly, Antony Hall, Ruth Maclennan, Rachel Mayeri, Beatriz da Costa, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson

Supported by

Arts Council England, Darwin 200, A Foundation

An art and science conference exploring cosmology and the nature of probability

It is said that we are living in a golden age of cosmology. Slowly the way the universe is put together is unfolding before our eyes. In 1999, Northern Europe was a direct witness to the way spinning bodies inexorably move in predictable paths when the sun went dark over Cornwall, the English Channel and in a line all the way to India. Artists are playing a part in these realisations: James Turrell remodelled a massive crater to capture the sun's light, Janet Saad-Cook worked with the Very Large Array in New Mexico to harness directly the sun's movements to create art, and Cornelia Parker attempted to send a meteorite into space. 

'Cosmic Chances' brought the scientists who battle with the fundamental mysteries of the universe - from NASA, the French Space Agency, Jodrell Bank and SETI - into a series of unique exchanges with artists at London's historic Royal Institution in this Arts Catalyst's conference. 

Speakers

Conference Chair Roger Malina, Director of NASA's Extreme Ultra-Violet Explorer Observatory and Founder/Editor of Leonardo, the art science journal, presented the hottest astronomical discoveries from space telescopes

Artist James Turrell unveiled the final stages of his extraordinary life-long project at the Roden Carter - an extinct volcano transformed by earthmovers into a massive artwork.

Cosmologist Marcus Chown author of 'The Afterglow of Creation and the forthcoming 'The Magic Furnace', explored the chance correspondences that keep the nuclear reactor in the sky running.

Janet Saad Cook, artist, described her project for the Very Large Array - an enormous field of radio-telescopes in New Mexico - as part of her Global Sun Drawing, a single globe-encircling work of art using the sun.

David Wark, particle physicist, described the search for the - as yet undetected - solar neutrino underway in deep chambers around the world. Life Spreading Through the Universe

Chandra Wickramasinghe, collaborator with Sir Fred Hoyle on 'Life in the Cosmos' and other books, introduced the provocative notions of panspermia, biological determinism and cosmological constraints.

Historian Frank James of the Royal Institution examined the significance of chronicles and records of eclipses through the centuries.

Cornelia Parker, sculptor, described the progress in her extraordinary project to return a meteorite back into space.

Ian Morison, Jodrell Bank scientist and co-ordinator of Britain's role on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence with the SETI Institute, updated the latest search with the big dish.

Sandra Chapman, astrophysicist from the University of Warwick, unveiled our precarious connection with the sun - the solar wind, a hurricane or particles which blows from the sun at incredible velocities, buffeting and battering the earth and extending far beyond the furthest planet of the solar system.

Ansuman Biswas, artist, described his proposal to place an array of dishes thousands of miles apart in uninhabited places to collect whatever falls from the sky.

Amanda Baker, regional co-ordinator of the SETI League, explained how the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is significant for the whole community.

Andrew Steele is an astrobiologist working on a project for NASA. He hopes to investigate the first sample coming back from Mars.

A free evening of talks with bioartist Oron Catts and Kira O'Reilly

Kira O'Reilly talks about her artistic experiments using modern biological technologies, including culturing skin from non-human animals, and how this led to subsequent performance work, including her durational performance with a dead pig, Inthewrongplaceness, and subsequently a live one, Falling Asleep with a Pig. The latter she presented as part of Interspecies in Manchester and London in 2009.

Oron Catts discusses his new project Crude Matter' is the direct translation of the Hebrew word Golem, a creature created by magic, often with the sole purpose of serving its creator. In one popular account, the Golem grew stronger and stronger, but instead of heroic and helpful deeds, Golem became increasingly uncontrollable and even destructive.

Artists' websites

Kira O'Reilly

Oron Catts

The Arts Catalyst brings its unique galactic gatherings to Paris bringing together those interested in sharing cultural ideas about space

A new series of galactic gatherings for earth-bound artists, space engineers, performers, astronomers, musicians and anyone interested in exploring and sharing space in original ways.

Every KOSMICA session brings together the cosmically curious and culturally quirky space community. Monthly KOSMICA evenings will bring together a social mix of art–space programmes - a film screening, performance or live concert with a short presentation, talk and debate about alternative and cultural uses of space.

KOSMICA Paris - Sunday 11 March 2012, 6-10pm

With a focus on Artists working with satellites, tonight's presentations will be made in a mixture of French and English, the line up includes:

Roger Malina, astronomer, editor and Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology at the University of Texas, where he is developing Art-Science R and D and Experimental publishing research. Malina is the former Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and his specialty is in space instrumentation; he was the Principal Investigator for the NASA Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite at the University of California, Berkeley. He also has been involved for 25 years with the Leonardo organization whose mission is to promote and make visible work that explores the interaction of the arts and sciences and the arts and new technologies.

Marko Peljhan studied theatre and radio directing at the University of Ljubljana. He is professor in interdisciplinary studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2005 he has been coordinating the design and utilisation projects, including the development of a polar orbit microsatellite, for the final Arctic and Antarctic Makrolab missions as part of the International Polar Year (2007/2008). Pelhjan is flight director of zero-g flights 1-3 with the Noordung group, and organiser of flight 1 with the GCTC with Kitsou Dubois

Nelly Ben Hayoun considers ‘Surreal Interactions’ and proposes how we could embed creativity in our daily lives. With creations like The Soyuz Chair, Royal College of Art Design Interactions MA graduate, Nelly explores the possibilities of space tourism, weightlessness and the thrill of the unknown.

Juan José Díaz Infante's Ulises is a nanosatellite being launched soon next year, conceptualised and developed by a Mexican group of artists during the past year: The Mexican Space Collective. Ulises is born out of the necessity of creation of parallel and alternate reality, explores the need of any citizen on Earth to be able to shape any future he wants not being dependant on the system. In this special Kosmica evening we will show the personal journal of the mission’s director, a day-to-day intimate journal of his different experiences as the shaping of this project has taken place. A story worth telling.

Regina Peldszus asks - how will we actually live in space?  Regina Peldszus’s work in space architecture and design explores the psychological challenges of isolation and monotony of space crew on extended exploration missions. And concerns human-technology-nature interaction in extreme environments, off-duty and medical design aspects in space and their spin-offs. She is based at the Design Research Centre and the Astronautics & Space Systems Group, Kingston University London.

ITACCUS

Kosmica is an endorsed project by ITACCUS. This event occurs before the annual ITACCUS meeting at the the International Astronautical Federation, a worldwide federation of organisations active in space.

KOSMICA Paris

Une réunion galactique pour les esprits à la curiosité cosmique

Le project KOSMICA est soutenu par ITACCUS. Cet événement se déroulera avant l’assemblée annuelle ITACCUS hébergée par la Fédération Internationale Astronautique, un organisme qui réunit les organisations du monde actives dans l’espace.

10 pour finir et commencer #5, La Société des Curiosités, 24 Place Sainte Marthe,
Métro: Colonel Fabien or Belleville. Paris, FRANCE
18h – 22h Dimanche 11 mars 2012 – manifestation gratuite

Cette manifestation, la première édition à Paris des rencontres galactiques Kosmica, est construite autour d’Artistes travaillant avec des satellites, et présentera
Roger Malina, Director, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille/CNRS (2000-2004) et co-investigator NASA Far Ultraviolet Explorer Program.
“Interactions surréelles”, avec Nelly Ben Hayoun, qui propose des moyens de faire entrer la créativité dans notre vie quotidienne. Avec des œuvres telles que la Chaise Soyuz, Nelly explore les possibilités du tourisme spatial, de l’apesanteur et de l’excitation de l’inconnu.
Le travail de Marko Peljhan s’intéresse au développement d’un microsatellite à orbite polaire pendant le projet Makrolab en Arctique et en Antarctique. Pelhjan est le directeur de vol des vols zéro-g 1-3 avec le groupe Noordung, et organisateur du vol 1 en collaboration avec le GCTC et Kitsou Dubois.
L’Ulysse de Juan José Díaz est un nanosatellite qui doit être lancé prochainement.  Ulysse est né de la nécessité de créer des réalités parallèles et alternatives, et explore le besoin que ressent tout citoyen sur Terre d’avoir les moyens de donner forme à un futur de son choix, sans être dépendant du système. Lors de la soirée spéciale Kosmica, nous exposerons le journal personnel du directeur de la mission, un journal intime quotidien relatant ses différentes expériences alors que le projet prend forme. Une histoire qui mérite d’être racontée et écoutée !
Regina Peldszus qui demande : comment, concrètement, vivrons-nous dans l’espace ? Une exploration des difficultés psychologiques de l’isolation et de la monotonie vécues par les équipes spatiales lors de leurs missions exploratoires prolongées.
Le project KOSMICA est soutenu par ITACCUS. Cet événement se déroulera avant l’assemblée annuelle ITACCUS hébergée par la Fédération Internationale Astronautique, un organisme qui réunit les organisations du monde actives dans l’espace.

Artists' websites

Regina Peldszus
Nelly Ben Hayoun 
Marko Peljhan 
Juan José Díaz Infante