ARTISTIC PROPOSALS ON CULTURAL APPLICATION OF JEM 2009 ISS ART EXPERIMENT PROGRAM

By TAKURO OSAKA

“If I were to create art in space, it would be composed of light.” Souichi Noguchi, the Japanese astronaut, commented after the STS-114 mission to artists at a debriefing session held at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music in October 2005. He stated that through his visual experience in outer space, he felt that light had an artistic
potential in space. The statement was a great inspiration for me as a creator of light art and as a professional who conducts studies on space and art, and gave me the opportunity to write this paper. (Mission Debriefing Session by Astronaut Noguchi, 2005)

In 2008, when the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) “KIBO” will be docked to the ISS (International Space Station), the pilot mission for artistic experiments will begin. Prior to this mission, since 1996, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) has been conducting research on the effective application of cultural-social sciences to JEM, and since 2000, has carried out experiments pursuing the theme “Potential of Art in Space”.

The artistic experiments in the space shuttle by astronauts Doi (STS-87 Mission, 1997) and Noguchi (STS-114 Mission, 2005) are from this project. The present paper will report on the artistic experiments that started in 2000 and introduce the designs of the art pilot mission to be launch in 2008, and discuss the potential of art in space.

PROJECT PHONETHICA – SERENDIPITY ENHANCER EXPLORER THE WORLD THROUGH THE PHONETICS

By TAKUMI ENDO

Project Phonethica is an interdisciplinary art project, which explores the world through the phonetics of language. Combining scientific technology with art, Project Phonethica maps out the diversity and similarity of the worlds 6,000 existing languages. Project Phonethica aims at developing a practical strategy for vigorous survival in the post-modernized society, which has been openly enjoying chaos as a conclusion of its own fragmentation.

INTRODUCTION

Project Phonethica began in Tokyo and Paris in 2004, aiming to collect fundamental data through a wide range of interviews with for example: artists, scientists, composers, linguists, phoneticians, anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists. During this period of time, research has also been undertaken in order to develop Phonethica System – a computer system based on the phonetic feature of language

The project will be disseminated to the public in the form of online tools, interactive installations and other media in all over the world from 2007.

DEFRAGMENTATION AND MULTI_VIDUAL

By RICHARD KRIESCHE

INTRODUCTION

facing the earth under it’s global conditions we must realize, that we have become a victim of the one-world-one-mankind illusion. the fact is: the opposite is true. under nowadays global conditions we should speak of a billionfold world and mankind. whenever today’s human beings question the world and themselves, they no longer rely on their own unsupported sensory unifying systems, but more and more on science-and technoassisted, from each other independent devices and apparatuses. (cameras, microscopes, telescopes, film,- video-, computer-, netsystems, etc.) the reality check signifies, that human awareness has become more and more alienated by technology from the vision of the human existence as an integral whole. finally, as the human awarness has become substituted by the millionfold of technological devices it has also become obsolete with the most crucial consequence, the individual itself has fallen apart. this has happened following the speed and need of the scientific- technological progress of differenciation and specialisation. as a result, in the science- ans technology driven world the individual becomes splitted further and further into millionfold of fragments, pieces and bits which are already dispersed and distributed worldwide by the same technology. this kind of millionfold, fragmented in_dividual has become today’s contradiction to further speak of one world, one mankind and one universe.

BOUNDARYLESS NANOMORPHOLOGIES

By PAUL THOMAS

This paper investigates questions of spatial boundaries by presenting information related to artistic research developed in the area of nanotechnology. The paper establishes a link between Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of the refrain, vibration, milieus, territories, and rhythms and the synergies towards the immaterial substrates that constitute nano spatial boundaries. I look at a nano disintegration of territories and boundaries¹ through the ubiquitous nature of the refrain. The disintegration parallels concepts of the swarm and the multitude that constitute the postbiological body (Milburn 2005 p 283).

NORMAL TO AN ABNORMAL DEGREE

By MIKE PHILLIPS

This paper discusses interventions made by the author and collaborators into the extreme territories that lie outside ‘normal’ human frames of reference. In the space-between the speed of a building, the collective archetypal view from space and the frame-by-frame memory of a catastrophe, lies a new perspective that relocates us from the foreground to the vanishing point. The view through the Albertian window has lost its relevance, it is no longer reassuring, it just doesn’t look ‘normal’ anymore.

GROWORLD HPI SPECULATIONS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN PLANT INTERACTIONS

By MAJA KUZMANOVIC and NIK GAFFNEY

“Our present global crisis is more profound than any previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic. I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the 21st century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.” (McKenna, 1992)

As a botanical parallel to the oft misunderstood field of HCI – Human Computer Interaction, HPI – Human Plant Interaction, explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate mutually beneficial interaction between humans and plants. HPI necessarily takes a symbiotic approach, being shaped by the questions it poses, such as; how`fr`can this two-way interface be realised? What assumptions are we making with regards to how we understand humans and plants? Do we need individual, specialised interfaces for each species, language or alkaloid, or are there more general approaches? How would they work? Where, or what is the point of contact between the humans and plants? How do we make the transition from machinic to organic? From boolean logic systems to systemic ecologic? What changes are required, and what further changes would occur in the plants, or humans using such interfaces? How does the nature of time, place and metabolic byproducts differ on each side of these interfaces? Are they reconcilable, or even mutually explicable? What can we learn from each other? How can we form a closer symbiosis and better understanding between the human and vegetable kingdoms once we open the gates between them? Communication, or pollination?

Illustration 1: Tree Woman. Drawing by Lina Kusaite, 2007

WE ARE EXTREMOPHILES

By LOUISE BEC

We are all extremophiles. (1)

Life is undergoing tension.

Life is undergoing pressure.

Life is undergoing depression.

Life is undergoing transgression.

The biomass is being shaken, destabilised…

How shall we respond to the urgent questions regarding survival and meaningfulness…

How shall we elaborate new strategies for inventive adaptation in order to persist, faced as we are with the degradation of the conditions of life and our environments, which are becoming progressively more toxic – and sometimes even deadly.

We are all extremophiles who possess the memory of the origin of life.

Life developed in an unwelcoming world, bringing with it a long-lasting transformation of the environment through the creation of an atmosphere. (2)

Life has invented various strategies in order to leave the oceans and occupy the ensemble of ecosystems and the greatest possible number of ecological niches.

We are therefore accountable for this ‘living whole’ – not only because we are part of it, but because of our growing awareness that it is becoming fragile, falling apart and undergoing dramatic amputations as a result of the planet’s ‘ecosystemic turbulences’.

We are extremophiles immersed in a labyrinth of prejudicial aggressions.

THE INVERTED EYE: A TRANSDISCIPLINARY GAZE INTO THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MIND

By KAREN INGHAM

Rene Descartes, when writing on optics and consciousness, (La Dioptrique 1637) instructed the reader to follow the advice of the German priest Christopher Sheiner, who, in 1619 used the dead eye from a recently deceased body as the lens for a camera obscura. Thus Descartes, perhaps best remembered, as the principle architect of Cartesian dualism, becomes the unwitting proponent of a tangible connection between body and mind in the relationship of vision to cognition and consciousness. Descartes was fascinated by the possibilities offered by the camera obscura, not least as an aid to understanding the complex mechanisms of sight and cognition. In his misguided search for the ‘seat of the soul’ (which he deduced was in the pineal gland) he spoke of looking into the metaphorical ‘mind’s eye’, in Descartes’ time impossible, but now thanks to fMRI scanners and confocal microscopy, seemingly a reality. The ‘Cartesian Theatre’ (though not conceived by Descartes himself) offers us the spectacle of the mind as a darkened theatre where we may search for ‘the self’, but the self is an elusive spectre, and neurologists now know that the self is not constant but is in a state of continuous neurobiological flux.