Moon Vehicle

artist's article oon M he Moon Vehicle: Reflections T ng I n I from an Artist-Led Children’s g ima Workshop on the Chandrayaan-1 re Spacecraft’s Mission to the Moon a b s t r a c t This article reflects on the journey to the Moon of the spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 as it was interpreted through an Joanna Griffin artist-led workshop. The workshop participants were a group of children who lived close to where Chandrayaan was built and some of the engineers and scientists responsible for creating the spacecraft. Insights from the workshop show how a mission to the Moon draws The 2-week children’s workshop that is the fo- asked to come back when ISRO on both the technological and cus of this article was held at Drishya Learning Centre, located needed its spacesuits designed! This the imaginative; they also have in one of the urban slums of Bangalore, India. The workshop rejection, of course, only added ur- bearing on the relative agency was one of many events in a long-term project called Moon gency to the cultural mission. It also of these individuals to contribute to the Moon missions in ways Vehicle, begun in March 2008, which was based out of the Cen- indicated that the operating space that are personally meaningful tre for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) at the Srishti School for the Moon Vehicle project would to them. of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. Srishti is one of be at the fringes of ISRO and would the foremost design institutions in India and has a commit- take shape via unofficial, informal ment to pioneering art/science projects. The catalyst for the negotiations. Moon Vehicle project was the launch from India in October A short time after these events, I began a two-year appoint- 2008 of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which is currently out of ment as artist-in-residence at Srishti, in the role of mentor contact at an unidentified location in the vicinity of the Moon, to the Moon Vehicle project. Many of the outcomes of this where it was sent to collect data on terrain, minerals and the project were devised with students from Srishti and offered enigmatic possible presence of water. Moon Vehicle is a trans- ways to share and elicit common understandings of the Moon. lation of the Sanskrit word chandrayaan and was conceived as a The use of a projection of the Moon’s image via telescope vehicle through which the cultural dimensions of the mission onto the ground became something of a motif for the work. could find a space to be articulated. The idea for this art/ Looking down at the Moon instead of up at it created a poet- science project came about during the Bangalore Space and ics of inversion that opened new spaces for thinking about Culture Symposium in 2007 [1]. This symposium comprised its image, bringing up questions of the relation between the a mixed forum from the communities of the sciences and the Earth and the Moon and the treatment of each. The image arts, in which speakers from the Indian Space Research Or- on the ground naturally organized people into a circle, in ganisation (ISRO) gave presentations alongside artists and which the acoustics were perfect for many kinds of sharing theorists. and storytelling to occur. The projection also made it possible The resonant point at which to begin the story of this work- to sit or stand on the Moon (Fig. 1), and this location brought shop is that of a meeting that took place in which represen- with it perceptions that might not otherwise have been tatives from the Space and Culture Symposium organizing accessed. committee approached ISRO to formally request that collabo- In describing the workshop, which built on these sharing rations begin across their disciplines in order to celebrate the events, it is necessary to indicate something of the specificity coming launch of Chandrayaan and its anticipated combina- of the context in which it came about. The poetic reorienta- tion of cultural and scientific dimensions. Unfortunately, the tion that placed the Moon on the surface of the Earth helped response from the space agency was a resounding “no.” The draw out a set of nuanced, ongoing, provisional, localized and representatives from the art and design communities were personal relations with the Moon of the kind often lost in the grand narrative of institutionalized space technology. It is with a similar emphasis on the nuanced, localized and personal that the Moon Vehicle workshop is shared here, not as a Joanna Griffin (artist). E-mail: <[email protected]>. model education project to be repeated elsewhere but rather See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/45/3> for supplemental files associated with this issue. to show what a necessary stage in finding the meaning of a techno-scientific Moon mission looked like in practice. What happened was particular to the time and place, fulfilling a need not otherwise being met. It addressed a continuum of article Frontispiece. Drawing by Prashant-J made at the indian needs, motivations and opportunities and emerged by way of Deep space Network, byalalu, bangalore. (Photo © Joanna Griffin) the drawing shows the path of Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon together a series of serendipitous, fortuitous, intended and unintended with the telemetry between the spacecraft and the receiving dish at encounters. However, it also took place within a larger, histori- byalalu. the scientist who explained this is depicted. cally contingent framework. © 2012 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 219–224, 2012 219 oon The vision expressed by Vikram Sara- M bhai, that space technology would be he T used to alleviate the immediate problems ng I of India’s people, reflected a quality of n I humility lacking in the competitive Space g Race drama being enacted between the ima re U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. There was a clarity and sincerity to his purpose, a rationality and logic to his proposals and above all a humanitarian vision. It is notable that he would not be drawn into the politi- cal vanity of Moon missions. He rejected any idea of Indian spacecraft going to the Moon and mistrusted what he saw as the questionable motives of such a journey, saying, “If we are to rely on historical experience, man will surely push ahead with adventures of this type backed by motives which will inevitably be mixed” [3]. In the light of this founding ideol- ogy, the mission of Chandrayaan marked a 180º turn in viewpoint both from the Fig. 1. the image shows one of the ways the projection of the Moon was used during the Earth and from this respectable philoso- Moon Vehicle project: as a way of eliciting a personal experience of the Moon. (Photo © phy. The hitherto altruistic ecology of Joanna Griffin) During a workshop about imagination and technology, a student is explain- ing how she became stranded on the Moon. the space program lost, in the case of Chandrayaan, a recognizable connection to the people of India. The Moon Vehicle workshop then fell bluntly into the con- Context and IdeologIes in 1947, held a strong conviction that sci- ceptual gap and asked the awkward ques- The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, the ence had to be an integral part of nation- tion of the relevance of the Moon mission Moon Vehicle project and the model of building, as it could be used to alleviate to the people of India and particularly to pedagogy developed at Drishya Learn- poverty and many other problems the na- the issue of poverty. While it is right to ask ing Centre correspond to the domains tion faced at the time. As a consequence, this question, it is itself a question beset of spacefaring, experimental media art the Indian constitution notably contains with assumptions that hang on the nar- practice and radical education. While a clause stating that one of the duties of row definitions of identity and presump- there are many factors that influence a the citizen is to develop the “scientific tions of need assigned to poverty [4]. course of events, some recognizable and temper.” The founder of the Indian space Nowhere are these assumptions about others less so, what appeared to be the program was Vikram Sarabhai. He and identity and need more strongly opposed common thread that galvanized these Nehru were close friends and had similar and more clearly articulated than by the groups at that particular time and place ideas. Thus a powerful tie of space tech- communities that are so labeled. The was a shared aspiration to transform an nology to the transformational potential Drishya Learning Centres [5], located on identity. The Chandrayaan mission, the of science through nation-building is illegally occupied land (slums) in several Moon Vehicle intervention and Drishya’s forcefully present in the collective imagi- areas of the city, proceed from a robust education philosophy each had an iden- nation of Chandrayaan within India [2]. philosophical framework that promotes tity and a narrative to dislodge and re- This Moon mission also holds particular self-determination. In this encounter claim. While Chandrayaan’s work was in significance within the story of India’s with the space agency, Drishya helps to part to dislodge the perception of India 50-year satellite program. Up until Chan- expose the type of relative and nuanced as a developing nation by showcasing drayaan’s launch, India’s highly success- spaces of agency available to individuals, spectacular technology, the art-and- ful space industry had focused on the who are consistently factored out by the culture project Moon Vehicle was in- Earth, on remote sensing and communi- sheer scale of operation of a space pro- tended to dislodge the now-dominant cation applications, in a uniquely poetic gram and its thinking space, however hu- scientific narrative of the Moon with alliance between high-end technology manitarian its motives may appear.

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