• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409406775452104 by guest on 01 October 2021 From Méliès to Galaxy Quest: The Dark Matter of ART 2004 SPACE the Popular Imagination ABSTRACT Michael Punt, The authors argue that an Martha Blassnigg interrogation of cinema can reveal the fragility of our knowl- edge and the underlying impera- and David Surman tives that the social construction of space responds to. A revi- sionist overview of the issue of professional interfaces in the popular arts is followed by a discussion of the influence of space technology and natural ICHAEL UNT NTRODUCTION Méliès is perhaps best known in space phenomena on human M P : I personal and collective belief This paper was stimulated by the film Galaxy Quest (Parisot, space research for making the first systems in order to open the 1999), which collapses the fictitious dimensions of space travel space movie (indebted no doubt way for an outline of the con- into the scientific perception of real space travel in order to to Jules Verne), and his career as a cept of participatory cultures shoemaker, conjuror, theater owner and the relationship between reveal some insights into the cultural construction of space. fiction and science. In this collaboration, the three authors [1] inquire into the and early film producer provides ev- metaphorical, metaphysical and metadiscursive aspects of tech- idence of the technological imagi- nology by integrating a range of scholarly activities and am- nation as it reveals the residues of plifying them through non-hierarchical collaboration within the very antagonistic energies that an institutional environment [2]. It combines the research of stimulated the enthusiasm for cinema. Méliès was not unique artists, filmmakers, photographers and designers with the aim in his fascination with the ecology of technology at the close of advancing our understanding of the history of technology of the 19th century. Perhaps less familiar is the British film- and exploring new modalities of academic and practical re- maker James Williamson, who made The Big Swallow in 1900, search. Consistent with this overarching concern, this paper a time when, for metropolitan audiences at least, moving pic- deals with the human imagination and regards it as a mir- tures were becoming familiar, and the sight of a cinematogra- ror image of space. Like space, the imagination is largely un- pher filming a busy street—or sometimes even the venue of a knowable, and all that we can ever say about it as an entity is forthcoming séance—was also becoming a commonplace. As based on conjecture drawn from our fragmentary perception the sales catalog note that accompanied the film at the time of the wake of its apparently infinite energy. We have chosen, tells us, we see an ordinary man become so irate at a ubiqui- as a methodology, to study the visible residue of the human tous photographer that he swallows him up, camera tripod and imagination in the arts, science and technology and to ex- all. After his mischief he backs off from the film camera, smack- trapolate the network forces that seem to intersect at their ing his lips, and hams up the joke for the audience in a ges- instantiation, aware all the time that we are describing a hu- ture of mutual conspiracy. It is a simple gag film manifesting man and cultural condition rather than explaining it. For this an antique humor, but it would be a mistake to see it simply as group of authors our common point of departure is cinema, a schoolboy joke, since, although there is a displacement from a technological anachronism that initially caught the public the cinematographe to the still camera, the film is nonethe- imagination in ways that no scientist, inventor, technologist, less suggestive of a certain unease—even antagonism—aris- entrepreneur or showman ever predicted. The 19th-century ing from the gap between a photographic technology that is conjuror and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès and a few British used to represent the world and those who look at its repre- eccentrics—mediums, showmen and instrument makers—are sentations. This particular disaffection is elegantly summed up possible exceptions. in the conspiratorial gesture Williamson’s actor makes as he digests the machine that represents him; he takes technology into the imagination of the interior body from which it was born as an invention. Re-assimilating the machine is a senti- Michael Punt (educator, researcher), Trans-technology Research, University of Plymouth, Newport, U.K. E-mail: <[email protected]>. ment that, judging by our own cinema, has persisted, as we see Martha Blassnigg (educator, researcher), Trans-technology Research, University of a recirculation of both a celebration and a covert criticism of Plymouth, U.K. E-mail: <[email protected]>. new technology in popular movies such as Jurassic Park (Spiel- David Surman (educator, researcher), School of Art, Media and Design, University of berg, 1993), Barb Wire (Hogan, 1996), Twister (de Bont, 1996), Wales, Newport, U.K. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Mission Impossible (de Palma, 1996) and, as Martha Blassnigg Based on a paper presented at “Space: Science, Technology and the Arts” (7th Workshop on Space and the Arts), European Space Research and Technology Center (ESA-ESTEC), discusses below, Barbarella (Vadim, 1968). As we sit in the cin- Noordwijk, the Netherlands, 18–21 May 2004. ema in the thrall of the technology, we celebrate its downfall as time after time the old values of embodied intelligence and intuition succeed where technology fails. This comfortable Article Frontispiece. David Hurn, Untitled, 1967. (© David Hurn) (even pleasurable) coexistence of apparently contradictory dy- ©2006 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 12–18, 2006 13 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409406775452104 by guest on 01 October 2021 that as technology has turned wireless, an- gels have become wingless once again [5]. My own field research reveals that they can present themselves in contemporary SPACE ART 2004 SPACE clairvoyant perception as rather abstract light-beings similar to the Aurora Bore- alis. In this interrelation of spirit and technology, the angel can be seen as a symptomatic concept that exceeds its re- ligious connotations and, as we will see, can be turned into an intercultural, in- terconnecting, service-oriented, mobile, flexible, genderless and ubiquitous me- diator. Traveling through and beyond the material limits of time and space, the an- gel becomes an almost perfect compan- ion to the bytes and bits of contemporary communications technology. In comparison to the dominant ex- pressions of fear and destruction con- fronting alien space in most mainstream movies, more constructive imagination has been projected and reiterated in pop- ular subcultures since the technologi- cal venture of space travel in the 1950s. As we have seen, almost from its ear- liest beginnings, cinema incorporated popular and esoteric interpretations of metaphysics into its “imagination.” As a consequence, cinema can provide an ev- idential base in both its medium and con- tent for the exploration of the way space and time have been imagined and also how they have been understood scientif- ically. Edgar Morin, for example, reflect- ing upon the similarities between the cinematographic experience and human imagination [6], notes how cinema of- fers a symbiosis that integrates the spec- tator in the flux of the film, and the film into the psychical flux of the spectator [7]. Cinema, the dream machine or time machine, and “homo demens,” the pro- ducer of fantasies, myths, ideologies and Fig. 1. David Hurn, Untitled, 1967. (© David Hurn) dreams, both evoke magic as an interi- orized quality through affection. Robert D. Romanyshyn argues that when Alberti namics in a coherent reality provides our fect platform for imagination and fan- (1404–1472) invented the linear per- first piece of evidence that the imagina- tasy within popular culture and offers a spective of depth with a vanishing point, tion is dark matter manifest to our intel- plane for metaphysical and imaginative the inexplicable moved inside and be- ligence in its various instantiations as inquiry. In a spiritual context, this con- came an interior quality of imagination. complex, intersecting network forces be- cept of darkness and void apparently This new perception not only moved an- yond the reach of reason [3]. contradicts the prevalent imagination of gels and demons out of heaven and clouds divine light and the spiritual imaginary onto the same horizontal plane in paint- crowded with heavenly creatures, yet ings, but also prepared the imagination MARTHA BLASSNIGG: there are notions that relate invisible di- for space travel by liberating the figure ESIRE MAGINATION D , I vine light to darkness [4]. In the most from the base line of the image and situ- AND TECHNOLOGY: HOW profound realm of darkness, the space ating it in the middle of the frame [8]. TO LOVE (IN) SPACE craft and the angel both have conquered Cultural expressions in various me- This scientific idea of dark matter, and colonized outer space as part of our dia productions are indispensable both whether meant in reference to the still human attempts to overcome the mate- to illustrate and to justify scientific tech- unexplored mystery of the universe or rial limits of three dimensions by fusing nological ventures [9]. In this sense, used as a metaphor for our inexplicable the spiritual with technological media. many have argued for the important role human brain capacities, provides a per- Their histories have become fused, so played by the transmission of film images 14 Punt et al., From Méliès to Galaxy Quest Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409406775452104 by guest on 01 October 2021 of the 1969 moon landing in touching, concepts on the exploration of space or restoration of its functioning, and its involving and convincing a broad audi- (Color Plate B).

Load more

  7

Copy Link