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Editors' Note These Two Conversations Were Initiated by the Fondation Out of the Present. Dir. Andrei Ujica, 1995. Sergei Krikalev Editors’ Note These two conversations were initiated by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporaine on the occasion of the exhibition 1 monde réel, and took place in the spring of 1999. The first, between Andrei Ujica and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, more conversational in tone, revolves around the experience of space travel. The second, between Ujica and Paul Virilio, is more theoretical. Both address Ujica’s 1995 film, Out of the Present, a cinematic reconstruction of Krikalev’s historic ten-month flight on board the MIR Space Station, a journey in which the cosmo- naut departed from the Soviet Union and, following the August coup in Moscow, returned to Russia. 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15263810260573254 by guest on 25 September 2021 Toward the End of Gravity I SERGEI KRIKALEV/ANDREI UJICA TRANSLATED BY SARA OGGER Andrei Ujica: It must be about five years since we first met, in Moscow. At the time, I had come here to make a film about your mission aboard the MIR Space Station in 1991–1992. In 1995 the film Out of the Present was finished, and since then neither of us has ever really escaped from this story: for my part, it’s a bit as if I myself had been in space, as if I’d really taken part in this adven- ture; and for your part, you’ve become—if you think about our appearances at festivals—a veritable celebrity, or at any rate a film personality. The decisive difference between us, though, remains the same: you’ve been in space and I haven’t. You’ve personally experienced space; for you, it’s a real world. What does it mean, ultimately, to live up there? Sergei Krikalev: When you return to the earth, the flight is of the moment and immediate, but at the same time it starts to feel unreal. Precisely because you remember all the details exactly, it makes it all the harder to believe that you really spent time there. For me, your film is a kind of forced remembrance of the flight, sort of like a vacation film you watch later, which evokes all these extra images not even on the screen. That’s what it’s like for me when I see the film. Other than that, it’s always the same: after a while every trip seems to become immaterial and starts to resemble a fiction. That’s why I often find it difficult to grasp that I’ve personally experienced one adventure or another. AU: Still, what does it really mean to live in space? What’s the first thing you think of? SK: It’s not easy for me to answer this question, because I’ve been on a total of four space flights, which means that I’ve spent in all more than fifteen months in outer space, and each of these flights was different. If you leave the country for a few days, then you can summarize your feelings in just a few sentences, but if you under- take a longer trip, then things get more complicated. The 1991–1992 mission was my second flight. I already had an idea of life on board, like what is required of you and how to handle yourself. Alright, then, the decisive difference between life on Earth and life in space is, without a doubt, the lack of gravity, because you constantly have to be cautious of even the slightest motions, to gauge the entropy of things, and to be patient. And that’s true for the entire time in space. In the end, life there is marked by two things: being dependent on a very compact and, after a while, restrictive living area, and the Grey Room 10, Winter 2003, pp. 46–57. © 2003 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15263810260573254 by guest on 25 September 2021 weightlessness. But what I normally think of first when I recall my life in space is the view out the window. What you can see out there is overwhelming. AU: Let’s talk a bit more about weightlessness. Here we’re pri- marily dealing with a physical experience that starts when one reaches orbit. As far as I know, that experience is anything but pleas- ant. At a certain point, though, this sensation is said to give way to its opposite. SK: Each person experiences it differently. I was lucky, personally, because I didn’t suffer too much. Still, it’s not easy. Weightlessness is, no matter what, a kind of burden. It changes us physically: our faces swell because the blood rushes to the head, while the blood vessels themselves also expand. And this state continues during the entire flight. You need a certain amount of time to get used to it, which doesn’t mean that it gets any easier. On the other hand, for me personally it is easier to get used to weightlessness than to get used to gravity again later. AU: From a psychological point of view the most important change is probably the loss of any real points of orientation. Unlike our situation on Earth, where we stand with both feet firmly planted on the ground because gravity creates a “universal” stable vertical axis, all this disappears in zero gravity. What sort of specific con- sequences does this have? SK: On Earth there are two mutual horizontal axes: front/back and left/right. These are different than the vertical axis of up/down. In outer space, they are all equivalent. And when you think about it, that’s perfectly normal. For in themselves all directions are equally important. Why should there be a hierarchical distinction between the vertical and the horizontal? In space I can sleep on the wall of the cabin or work on the ceiling. In order to give us our accustomed points of orientation, though, the space station contains helpful indicators such as light and color. One can hardly imagine the amount of psychological study that must go into the construction of a space station, all with the sole purpose of minimizing the cos- monaut’s feeling of alienation from home. The ceiling, or better, the surface designated as such, is different from the other surfaces in its white color and lighting, even though you could sleep as well as work there. Correspondingly, the side defined as the floor has its own color. The side walls, too, are nothing other than surfaces entirely comparable in their function. In this way, simple orientation points are created artificially, where otherwise all directions are equal. You could turn the space station upside down and still the same axes of reference would be in place. Despite all this it would be wrong to say that all directions are equal in space. It is true from a physical perspective, since all directions are born equal in their relation to the center of gravity. But since one is on a space station 48 Grey Room 10 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15263810260573254 by guest on 25 September 2021 that does nothing but continually circle the Earth, one is still subject to its gravitational tug. And in two ways, that is, in a psy- chological sense too. For this reason Earth is given special consid- eration. And we end up differentiating one direction from the rest: the direction of the Earth. If you are constantly looking toward one direction, you become increasingly aware of it. Just as here below we have historically loaded or emotion-filled places that will always mean something to us, in space we have the Earth as a whole. So its direction can’t be one among others. AU: It must be a very strange feeling not to have any weight for some length of time . SK: You know, the bodily sensation in zero gravity is the same as that in a free fall. When someone falls from a tree, the feeling that occurs in the short time before hitting the ground is exactly the same as in a state of weightlessness. A pretty strange feeling. Many people recognize it from that dream that makes you suddenly wake up. In space flight you start to “fall” as soon as you enter orbit. The propulsion jets are turned off, the acceleration is over, and the fall begins. And this state of affairs lasts until landing. It’s not a matter of a few dream minutes, but rather lasts for months. Eventually you get used to it, but at first it’s hard even to go to sleep. Imagine that you’ve jumped from a plane and, before your parachute opens, you have to try to live a completely normal life—do your work, get some rest, etc. That is exactly what zero gravity is like. AU: So then what’s it like when gravity reestablishes verticality upon your return to Earth, when you’re aware of your body’s weight again? Are you depressed because your body is suddenly so heavy? Do we terrestrials maybe tend toward depression because everything here is constantly being pulled downward, including our thoughts? SK: Hard to say. Mixed feelings are common. On the one hand it’s nice to be back in our natural environment, which was the whole universe to our ancestors. The development of human life Out of the Present. Krikalev/Ujica | Toward the End of Gravity I 49 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15263810260573254 by guest on 25 September 2021 has been ruled by the law of gravity since its origins.
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