Week 9: Space & Art

 This week’s materials covered information relating to space and art, with particular focus on the artist's ability to foresee and create reality out of imagination. I found the lecture videos and assigned readings to be very helpful in understanding the role of artists in our worldwide exploration of space and planetary rotation.

Artists' Imagination Inspiring Scientific Work and Technology, courtesy of Professor Vesna's Lecture

Professor Vesna explained how artist's creativity and imagination were major forces in the early stages of understanding space and how we could interact with it. Another important factor at the time making space exploration more prominent was the cold war and arms race between the U.S and Russia to construct deadly weapons of a new magnitude and prove dominance. By the mid to late 1950s technology had increased significantly and allowed for more opportunity to explore how close we could get to space, eventually calling to animals such as dogs and chimps to be the first space travelers in history. I previously had not known about animal space travelers and thought this was extremely controversial, although I do understand how this would generally be better accepted than beginning with human subjects.

Image of Laika, the first Being to be Launched into Space, courtesy of australiangeographic.com

We then swiftly transitioned to human space travel and our first moon landing, which was inevitably dreamt by artists long before scientists could have visualized such a tremendous accomplishment. Since the moon landing. Space travel has increased in volume and frequency, leading to a string of failed missions and numerous deaths. This called for a government pause on human space exploration and gave rise to multiple private space companies with the goal of commercializing space travel. Today, we juggle maintaining a balance between pushing the scientific and artistic bounds of such a fascinating realm of exploration, and protecting and conserving space from human destruction as we continue to infiltrate an otherwise undisturbed environment. Arthur Woods, a member of the Leonardo Space Art Project working Group states that humanity depends on the exploitation and utilization of space and its unique concentration of rare compounds as we move forward, while others caution this usage could create an irreversible imbalance. Personally, I find the history of space exploration to be so fascinating and out of the box thinking, however it is also really frightening how combining artists and scientists can so severely change our world and relationship with space in such a short amount of time.

The Potential of Space Exploitation and Mining, courtesy of mfame.guru

Sources:

About | ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE INITIATIVE. http://arcticperspective.org/about/about. Accessed 25 May 2022.

“CODED UTOPIA.” Continental Drift, 27 Mar. 2007, https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/coded-utopia/.

Home | Basic Plasma Science Facility. https://plasma.physics.ucla.edu/. Accessed 25 May 2022.

“Dogs in Space.” Australian Geographic, 29 Nov. 2016, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/education-resources/2016/11/dogs-in-space/.

Leonardo Space Art Project Visioneers. https://spaceart.org/leonardo/vision.html. Accessed 25 May 2022.

Team, Mfame. “U.S. Plans To Legalize Mining on The Moon.” Mfame.Guru, 15 May 2020, https://mfame.guru/u-s-plans-to-legalize-mining-on-the-moon/.

Wilson, Jim. “NASA History Overview.” NASA, 3 Mar. 2015, http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-history-overview.

Vesna, Victoria. "Lecture part 1-5." DESMA 9, 25 May 2022, UCLA, Bruinlearn, Unit 9.