 Thank you for having us and my name is Ava Diaz. I'll be moderating the panel. I teach at Pratt in the History of Art and Design Department and I recently finished the manuscript to a book called After Spaceship Earth about the legacy of Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art, of which the last part of it is about the privatization of space, different models of ecological injustice and seeking justice that artists have been pursuing. So it's my great pleasure to be on this panel and we'll have a hopefully plenty of time for questions from the audience and you know we'll have a chance to talk amongst ourselves too. So I want to just introduce by name and then let them just give a word about who they are. This is Agnes and she, I'll just go down the line Agnes Tomas, Laurie and Josh. So if you just say one sentence about who you are and where you're based. Hi yeah I'm an artist working at the experimental edge of art, science, new technologies, old technologies, exploring the zone between fact and fiction. In 2003 I have founded a small institute called Research Raft for Subterranean Science and its chief was mainly to explore subterranean phenomena and I developed tools, tools to search, it's a whole work series to explore these but then later I expanded my research directions, I did a project on wetlessness also and I, oh, microgravity and I started to explore phenomena inside Earth but also outside Earth and comparing the parallels in between and I also renamed my institute into Research Raft, Institute for Art and Subjective Science. Hello, hello, hello yes I'm Tomas Seraceno I'm very happy to be here and no I think so. Well I come usually often here I want to say thank you to Lila, Kidney, Caroline Jones, there's Pablo Suarez, a lot of friends, Jeanette and Bill McLean and a lot of people which usually I visit and we see and we maintain conversation through the time when I come here but the time that I want to spend here is I have a lot of sometimes troubles with the other talks that were before and then what I'm kind of just the exercise will be kind of brainstorming of proposal and idea and then the first proposal is like a you know space at the moment is outer space or whatever name you might say it started a hundred kilometers high right this will object stop falling and it's like usually now they call the Karanem line or something like this. I mean I think so there is a lot of problem with where space start and ends and I think so we should kind of really I think so one of the big thing and you know the hundred kilometer threshold you know it's always a cultural interpretation was not always at hundred in one more is two hundred and three hundred then hundreds I mean as a cultural negotiation with constant what I will kind of argue today is like a space we are in space now and I think so and I think so these response ability when we change where space starts and then I think so we'll help us to facilitate the discourse in a kind of a different tone that's kind of the first thing that I'm trying to and I will try to think together as an exercise today. I'm Laurie Anderson and I've been to stick to the one sentence I think I'm an artist who works with stories and lots of different media and I'm interested in right now and in more of the things I have to do with studying nature of mind and I'm Josh Simpson I am a glass blower a glass artist and I have spent the last nearly 50 years experimenting with melting silica and flux and and lime and putting them together making glasses that are interesting and trying to make them into some object that is intriguing and interesting to look at. Thank you so our brief in doing this panel was that each of the artists will present for about three minutes on their work and then we can open it up I have some questions and then we can open up to the audience so the order of the presentation will be first Agnes and then Josh then Tomas and then finally Laurie so I think that we have the slides cute up and if you go to know yeah I have there you see okay I will shortly introduce you to one very important and large department of my institute for art and science which is the Luna migration bird facility existing since 2008 and it's mungus colony which is an ongoing long-term performance installation and movie it's actually a method of private space traveling which was for the first time mentioned in a book by English Bishop Francis Goodwin in the year 1603 however the method that allowed the main main character to travel to the moon was with the help of mungies so and yeah mungies are very special migration birds who like other migration birds travel annually towards the autumn from Spain to Africa for example they migrate annually from the earth to the moon and I was wondering was what happened to the mungies in the 21st century does this special species still exist do they still know about their moon migration pattern or have them been stranded how could we implement the idea of flying would it be a genetic awakening or an imaginative awakening experimentally did they ever fly to the moon really or do they still fly so in 2011 I have actualized the concept of Francis Goodwin and I raised 11 mungies from birth on a farm in Italy and I teach them to become astronauts to be able to fly to the moon with them one day and first I named the eggs all names are related to space travel history here you see the team at it's an international team at the age of 11 days we started with the astronaut training immediately after hatching and yeah for example lessons on the space junk problem and yeah I will show you two or three methods very shortly out of many many many but there is it's an ongoing long-term project so there is here in the exhibition in front of the auditorium there's the movie mungu's colony it's 20 minutes long and it documents the first year of astronaut training so you can watch this it's 20 minutes yeah okay so let's have a look successful in printers are not only able to teach the ghostlings where to sleep and to walk what to eat but also to fly where to fly and how to get there levy after nine months of strenuous but successful training we are back to the MGC home base ready to start the next stage of the experiment okay I want to finalize now with some last remarks it's a long-term mission the first unmanned flight is planned for 2027 and the first manned flight for 2038 there have been already ghostlings born on our moon in Italy we have built a large moon analog there and so the mungu's colony is growing and the moon is getting closer and closer thank you thank you part of my talk has visual little photos so I'm counting on this clicker working okay so glass is this amazing alchemic stuff that is just sand and and even borax hands open if you put those two together on a table you're gonna wait a long time for them to do anything but if you add 2,400 degrees of heat they become this molten liquid that is almost impossible to deal with it's crazy hot and it drips and flows like honey it possesses an inner light and transcendent radiant heat that make it one of the most frustrating and one of the most fascinating things for an artist to work with and what inspired me originally was when I started to blow glass in 1971 I this photograph Bill Anders had taken this photograph just before and in 68 and I was entertaining kids who came to my studio and I thought I should try making planets out of glass to give them something to think about small planets they loved watching marbles but thinking about making something that would make them think about this world that we live on that seems so limitless and large is really just a small little blue marble in the black void of space and so I began using different glass techniques and and what's challenging about glass is that it it doesn't want to cooperate it's just a molten liquid it does not care about anything really except gravity and centripetal force and so my trick is to put as much detail and as much interesting things and let people imagine cities or oceans or continents or large structures on these planets and wonder perhaps it's an orbiting transiting exoplanet survey satellite that may discover them what I've found over time is that these little worlds are fascinating to all kinds of different cultures and races and different age groups everyone loves them the other thing that I've been working on more recently is part of what I love about glass point is inventing new things I really probably should have been a chemist or an engineer because I build my furnaces and I and I work on these glasses and most people who are chemical engineers working with glass are looking for certain optical properties or certain dielectric properties I'm looking for color and I want to that's a fire and you guys all know this photo and but but what I'm trying to do in my glass is make you think about something as cool as or as distant from us as these subtle images and so the idea is to have you think about something else somewhere in the universe but also be intrigued with the detail that's in them I've recently become interested in trying to display or depict a black hole what would an accretion disc look like and how can you make something that reflects light suck light in and this is this is my studio this is my glass studio I live and work across the driveway from each other and this was last Thursday and this is in Warmer Times we just installed solar panels so all the the the energy footprint of a glass studio is like a Sasquatch it's I but we are now making all the electric power that we use in in the glass studio and I have two more photos one is you will meet my wife Katie Coleman later on this afternoon I was making planets long before we met through an accidental wrong number on the phone in 1990 but but here's one of my planets this is another project called the infinity project to hide my planets around the world and so this one is hidden in space thank you because it's a bit awkward when I stand here and then you freeze it back and then try to get it here and yes it's three minutes to go as fast when breath becomes air when and through when atmosphere become the movement of our possible era against carton capitalist cloud and then let's say that yes if I cross the three minutes you just tell me and then we will try to keep it in a Q&A okay today I landed by plane collecting more points of shame on my golden card of carbon emission for three minutes I don't know how much carbon emission I put it really on this card while fossil fuel based industry tried to colonize other planets the air the interface between us and the Sun is controlled by few and continue to be compromised carbon emission filled the air particular matter float inside our length and while electromagnetic radiation envelop the earth dictating the tempo of digital capitalism in the era of global warming as we confirm last month in Nature magazine the constant rise of co2 and other atmospheric pollutant disperse the tropospheric clouds whose reflectivity helps to keep the balance of planetary temperature leaving forecast up to a degree Celsius it's been today one of the things that I want to say is like I feel when I see this rocket just bursting and putting up and on the cost that it take that I think so you know that when we were talking about what was the event or I know the person who was sitting before about this this moment of change when you go up and then you have this moment of how it's called the overview the overview effect I think so these are really encouraged what is the next overview effect that we have to have right is like a when I got into the plane and I came up here I think so I got it really bad overview effect I got flowing over Iceland and then you see the glacial you see the turbine of the jet I mean that's the not another overview effect that you have to get and what is the consciousness we have to get I mean do we still need to get up to the moon to get a reality of the planet that we are living today and this means I think so there is a problem over there okay and then we go on to the I don't see in the the epoch where we are trying to to foster and to work together with some of the people that I mentioned before with I don't see we propose an epoch of interplanetary sensitivity bring a new ecology of practice asking how we could breathe in a post fossil fuel economy and what is our response ability to be on air I like the split of the world responsibility what is your ability to respond to be today on air and how we can change the social political job geopolitical borders in the range of climate inequality how to participate in your epoch beyond the Anthropocene forward the decarbonization of the air and toward the independence of fossil fuel we propose an epoch called the air scene by promoting and this scrutinized free access to the atmosphere and beyond through collective activity sensitive experience across disciplinary discussion and do it yourself and we open up these new spaces again the world spaces I don't see that activate a common imagination to our new symbolic relationship with the air that we breathe I mean I will show a little bit what what are these kind of a space agency that we are trying to to bring up and how we can get into the air with a with this maybe ability to respond differently in 2007 we're community of people around the world we started collecting used plastic bags very important to mention about the reusing we cut them we paste them and we creating gigantic canvases and when with canvas unite bands and fold space is full of air is format and when the sunrise have to out of the horizon and the air is up inside the space the museum flies into the air a fly museum that we call the musero solar on these are solar journey gravity becomes upturned and instead of falling to the center of the earth we falling into the universe and this is why the way I brought a backpack and tomorrow is a sunny day I think so we could try to experience what is today to float in the air and it's a backpack that you know I have been kind of put up together with our friends and this community of erosine this means thanks to the heat of the sun that wore up the inside the space which is inside you know it just got up into the air and then well it's obvious that we don't use the fossil fuel batteries and all the kind of carbon capitalistic ideas of extracting economy we have been doing towards the planet and then sometime we do a free fly and this is the project that we have been doing with MIT that basically it was a collaboration with Ips with Lorda Viquilaria Glenn and Bill McKenna which some of them are here today and the thing is like a what what we are trying to do is like if I will have to take from Berlin to arrive to Boston I should have take off 8.3 days ago and I would just what he does it just compute all the wind currents which are kind of natural rivers of the wind and once we learn how to float in the atmosphere maybe then we can try to find a different equation of of our term in relationship with a ecology we're living I think so I stopped there because it was a bit too long but thank you Steve you can hear me we can start the video we're just going to take a very quick trip through a virtual reality work that I just did called To The Moon and it was commissioned by Louisiana Museum of Art my favorite art museum in the world it's just such a wonderful place in near Denmark and they were doing a show about the moon it starts out with constellations that evaporate as you look at them various ideas that used to be sort of permanently in the sconce in the sky just become these temporary things dinosaurs polar bears bees the word democracy this dinosaur that through some DNA just turns eventually into a car so there were lots of stories of originally with this work and like with a lot of projects that I work on they they get drowned in the media that I'm working in and you don't and they just seem unnecessary so a lot of this is much more about flying than stories it became it originated with a lot of moon imagery and ideas about the moon and it kind of went off in a in another direction the context of the show was lots of space gear and lots of theories and Galileo material notebooks and you know it was really a pretty beautiful show I hope it I travels I think it's actually going to Norway it just was there so then you zoom down into this other fossil fuel thing this of course is just a recording of somebody's version of this what I love about VR is first of all that you can fly and that's really the most important thing in this so that you go where you see and I here's we this was a scene was originally called moon a logo is about a lot of the debris and militarization of the moon so there's a lot of stuff in there there's little references to the little prints and all sorts of kinds of stories about the moon Fedorov was also one of the original characters we it was also at one point a kind of Russian mystery about all the using a lot of the Russian names on the dark side of the moon but it comes down to everything that I've done as an artist is about disembodiment and this is the greatest technique at the moment for for that although I think losing yourself you can lose yourself in a Russian novel you can lose yourself in a pencil drawing VR this is one in which the volition just drops out for a minute and you're kind of forced to the top of this mountain where you fall and you lose your body and it is it is terrifying I couldn't resist the scene that's in every space movie of the astronaut just jumps out onto he goes out to make a repair and then of course his cable gets cut and he tumbles off into space this is the scene with the largest prime number and there's this is the only body imagery in this one it ends with the kind of donkey ride on the moon and you're you can live to yourself as you're as you're riding along this was a reference to that lawsuit of the Chinese brought to international course a while ago saying that the Chinese own the moon and of course the Russians said we were there first and you know the Americans go no no no we put the first guy there and the Italians go we saw it first anyway that's it so this is a bit of an unfair question because actually Laurie has already answered it in the New York Times but I wanted to ask you all about Ysaku Mazawa's dear moon proposal and what you think about a tech e-commerce billionaire sending five to eight artists on a moon journey he's the first space X customer for the circum lunar voyage and we're in the kind of moment between maybe artists as pet or artists as being patronized by a patron which is not a new moment so maybe we could would you go on that voyage what do you think about that relationship of art to space at this moment I think wherever scientists go artists it's good when artists go as well art has many functions so it's though for me it's important that it stays free doesn't need to be aiming at at the result but it opens up perspectives it's just supporting other views and art forms culture so it's a human condition art that art explores our world as well but it's what I said before I think so it's all the time I mean this is a rhetoric question will you go to Mars you will go to the moon will you at which cost you know I mean this I mean I think so we have to really kind of shift the question of saying well you know what I mean is like is what I said before at which cost I came up here today to spoke three minutes with you how many carbon emission on the mode of transportation we have get and this I mean I will say yes I will go everywhere you wanted but reusing plastic back picked it up from the bottom of the ocean generating a community and generating something what we call you know it's like that and I think so it's all the rhetoric all the time you know Felix Watteri when he said the three ecology is the environmental ecology the social ecology and the mental ecology and until we don't have an ecological of practice established on this earth and we can have a certain type of mobility but not only kind of going somewhere where we are going we're not going nowhere and this I mean let's really change this overview effect and then build up some excitement of just only like it you know when when you see this culture lift him up you see the sun coming up from the horizon and then you float and then it's really you get into the air it's something which is beautiful is silent there's no explosion there's no rocket there is no noise there is no cut down you know what I mean or count down this meaning that is a completely different beautiful and things is up to us and I think so to build up these narratives there is another way to be in space and space it doesn't start at a hundred kilometer is here is among us let's stop to think about otherwise is again the cultural division that nature is outside you are not part of nature I mean it's how much politics and you know and you know investment that is to make us belong not anymore to nature is the same space is just a geopolitical and program to believe that we are not in space let's stop it maybe just once I mean I totally agree with you what I said is general the way we explore the world we live in I don't need to go up into space for example I'm also very interested in in space for example inside smallness it doesn't need to be up you answered it but maybe answer again from I don't remember what I said except really excited by the idea and but I do think it's a wonderful idea for artists to do that I had a very weird job in 2003 to five I was the first artist in residence at NASA and it was a really bizarre job I should also say it was also the last artist in residence and why because at one point they were just they were Congress was reviewing NASA's budget and they were looking looking at the same thing going at like 30 trillion for spy satellites yes you know it's it's very much about military efforts and as you know and and they went $20,000 for an artist in residence it was a whistleblower guy outrage and and so I am interested in getting that reinstated not for myself but although it was really wonderful to actually go there not to just think about it to go there to do these different places and and but I do think it's important to have an artist in residence in NASA I think it would be important to have an artist in residence in the White House in Congress in the Supreme Court artists look at the worlds differently you know we have a different agenda very very different one so I think that's a good idea on the other hand when some of my friends saw that I wanted to do that trip one of my friends I have a tendency to say yes to everything and she gave me a present I just realized I have it with me it's a pen that looks kind of like I'm a greet pipe it's it and so when people would say would you like to do the music for an underwater puppet show that's really interesting and and so she said you're just going crazy or so you're just say yes to everything so she gave me this pen which is a no pen so there's a little button here so somebody says would you like to do an underground underwater puppet show you you press the button or I think like for me as an artist I really have to think should I go to the moon or outer space you know should really do that you know there's lots of things to do here you know so I don't I had to revise my answer about that I don't know whether do that or not you would not I don't know it would be a hot I don't know it's on one side I think the experience nothing can a reason what's the name to X yeah to replace the your own real experience the being in in this or another reality so I am very for to go for experiences but going to the moon I can't answer I like to go to the moon with my movies actually it's a very slow traveling and for me for me it's hell yeah yeah I'll get on that and and I actually while you're talking I was thinking about one thing that my wife said in utter exasperation she said we can send a man to the moon why can't we send them all sorry Katie we need in here we need a few so this is a question that I don't want it to seem too simple but I want to maybe get at what the stake you and your artistic practices have in in these topics of space exploration so very simply how did you come to make work about space what was the you know there's many many things that you could make work about and what was the kind of you know what initiated the project that you showed and I know for many of you it's a long investment in space so what was that kind of originary impetus no once again because it seems like I don't know that there is this and they are not so many but there are a couple of John Powell is a good friend he wrote a book which is called the other American space program it doesn't seems like because oh I fly balloon it seems you cannot get to space and I don't want to go to space yes I want but not with carbon and fossil fuel extraction of this planet and not destroying this plan because of the addiction that we have to certain economies which are based on fossil fuel this mean I'm not saying like oh I don't want to go to the moon and to matter but I want to go in a certain way that I think so first we have to tune to be on this planet and learn to be on this planet with the people which are here and then see if we can get with certain sustainable way somewhere else and this I mean now forgot the question what was the other American space program this means is a really kind of a three stage architecture that you can really get into space with lighter than vehicles I mean when we show a couple of images he came to the white Sun we have hold the world record on lifting up a person in the air without burning any fossil fuel with a certified vehicle with a couple of years ago and then I don't know if it's really like a one by one you know what I mean if you're interested just keep thinking and can you know it's like you can float in the air without really having such a complicated point max three that he keep falling from the air I think so and nobody knows why Agnes how did you come in actually I my interest in space came through the subterranean because I was investigating subterranean places and I developed for some of these SGM iceberg probe to investigate subterranean icebergs and when you look into a deep ice borehole for example in Antarctica 1000 meter of depth it's pitch black down there only the from the little probe light you can see a bit and then you see the trans more or less transparent ice horizon slowly passing by and there are some stones frozen inside the clear ice and it looks like comets passing by so it's really like in space and then I got oh that's a space travel and then I started to investigate parallels between deep ice layers or subterranean places and outside earth and and so on it's just things develop it's like a resume growing of projects Lori was it the Louisiana invitation or was it the NASA residency that particular VR was was an invitation and a commission so they already had the subject so but but I would say mostly I'm interested in that as just raw energy what that is and recently I got the flu I don't know how many of you got this flu this is a whoa this is a 10-day of flu of like partly hallucinations and one of the things I have to tell you that I saw I saw the same thing for a couple of days that when my eyes were open as when they were shot and it was big organic things going like this raw energy just cheese is like and and the room was not there but these things were there in a kind of solar system size place and they're all moving like and they were pure energy and and so I I just couldn't imagine I thought what but they have no they're not differentiated they don't know that one thing is supposed to be a frog snows and another supposed to be your eyelash and another supposed to be a maple leaf where does this information come from so in this whole fever I'm just going back and forth like how do they know what to do you know and it was a very so it's probably that that most attracts me to this but it's also I've written a lot of things about stars and and one one of the songs ends you know the reason I really love the stars is because we cannot hurt them we can't blow them up or turn them out or you know but we are reaching for them and which we are reaching for them so I think that's and especially at the moment is my fascination with with that as an aspirational thing I guess and Josh you spoke a little bit about the planets and yeah I I think in the at some point in the early 70s I became interested in Landsat photos that sent and it was interesting looking at the earth from a different vantage point which led me to eventually get a pilot's license and spend a lot of time flying and and also to scuba dive because it's the same feeling you're you're in this little world and you're floating above the surface of something whether it's magical under the ocean or over the earth and and I think that at least in my work I think it's our job as artists to make people wonder and think about and and posit what it would be like and to get them excited about things that sometimes they pay no attention to and and I wanted to say here come over here and look at this imagine yourself an astronaut floating in orbit somewhere well there's been a lot of techno euphoric talk in the earlier panels and I think what what interests me about the work as you've described is there's a deep investment in the materials that you're I mean you have your training crew and in the country and with Thomas the work is really invested in how to think solar energy as an available resource to us without having to rely on fossil fuels with Lori's work it's like trying to get into VR as some way to unfold experience differently like as the kind of material reality of how disembodied one feels in that and then to kind of imagine that projective space as a speculation into futures and with Josh's to imagine this kind of visual material relationship that glass has to the kind of molten qualities of the earth itself it's a very self-reflexive position you know to be in as a glass blower to think yourself as sort of maker of worlds you know but I think that we I just see zero there so we are out of time but we want I wanted to have some time for questions which I hope we have a few minutes for so does anyone have any questions I think there's that odd tissue box or whatever it is you can yeah heads up thank you so much all of you for your your presentation and your ideas I feel like some that could be a question for any of you or all of you sorry from not in the light or something how do other species the perception that other species might have a space or their own belt in general might help us ask the questions about space or answer them differently what is the question other species other how the way other the way other animals sees a world how can that help us ask the questions about space in a different way feels like you're touching with a goose maybe some of your work to the spiders a lot of your password maybe with music and animals and also all the creatures that you're creating so post-humanism in space how do we kind of think differently about access I imagine you know what does it mean to for us to strive no I was thinking just like a because spiders also do a method which is called ballooning is the way how also they migrate and then something which is very beautiful also in relationship with the movements and the idea to moving is something which is called stillness in motion and this mean just a little bit I will go back to the human but then also let's try to remember how the spider it kind of ride these kind of rivers of the wind this mean if we will be kind of in a in a solar balloon let's put it that way that I have been only four humans in history of man a humanity who have lived up from the air without burning any fossil fuel and without using highly hydrogen this mean these are the real heroes for me let's put it that way the astronaut I love them but from their epoch and it's been the one who can lift up without a burning is good when you are in this kind of solar balloon and you do have sometimes the journals have been very very short a couple of kilometers this means you just the sun come up you rise with a balloon because the hot air is there if I will be talking with Eva and I look at her hair right here it do not move one millimeter now you watch 10 meters down the ground and the trees are shaking like crazy look at her and her move the hair doesn't move you move with the wind there is not for more friction anymore this will not experience sailing boat in any other mode and this mean that maybe is an overview effect it's like becoming the wind not moving the wind you move with the wind and it means your brain is really get confused it's like because I see her hair he doesn't move and I watch down the trees and he's gone when you move with the wind and you become the wind and the balance three questions that I do it is it's such a great question it's because you know we ship like a and spiders and just use them as kind of a instead of really studying how they actually communicate with each other which would we would learn an awful lot more about how we might approach communication and I have two cats that don't seem to care that much about art they do like things that roll like my planets yeah but it's I mean of course it's very enriching but it's a question of communication and I have spent so much time with my moongies they have their own communication structures and I it's a process to find ways how to communicate with each other I mean we have set up we have developed some communication devices for the keys so they have their own control room and they can send us Morse code data about their general well-being and about their experiments but it's still it's it's really a challenge to communicate with the total other species I don't know if you but for example until now I didn't find the key to initiate takeoff when I want let's say okay now okay let's take off and fly but it happens that one goose you hear a signal and then they take off and fly from one mountain to another but I didn't find the key and so it's a question of communication methods to develop a common language or never I don't know if it's possible at all the question there oh no more okay sorry we're out of time but thank you all so much