Collaboration with Kathryn Logan
Human Satellites // Vegetal Space // A Webscape Exploration is a collaborative virtual endeavor by Kathryn Logan and Jacklyn Brickman that meshes NASA sound recordings from outer space with a virtual 3d modeled Vegetal Space where viewers become satellites, exploring the unknown, giving form and life to (the) space.
There are two ways to experience this work. In the first, the artists will lead the explorers on a dual perspective movement, choreographed by Logan, through virtual space via screen recordings. In this version, Logan and Brickman explore under the avatar pseudonyms “Brassica Rapa” and “Raphnus Sativis”, after the Turnip and Radish vegetable planets they respectively explore. At intervals throughout the exploration they engage in a conversation formed from quotes by acclaimed science fiction author, feminist and mother, Ursula K. Le Guin (Raphnus Sativis), from Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Worlds, Women, Places, and as Tim Smit (Brassica Rapa), founder of The Eden Project and contributor to the collection of essays in Exploring the Implications of Human Settlement in Outer Space.
Viewers may also choose to visit the mozilla hub site to become Human Satellites in Vegetal Space and explore on their own here .
Human Satellites // Vegetal Space // A Webscape Exploration was originally meant to be a physical, interactive installation. This virtual format is Logan and Brickman’s adjustment to working collaboratively and interactively while in isolation during the COVID19 Stay-At-Home Order in April of 2020. Thank you to Urban Arts Space / Hopkins Hall Gallery for supporting this experiment.
A Speculative Conversation
Part I
Raphnus Sativis (text by Ursula K. Le Guin):
When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that's exactly what it's dealing with, not “the future”.
Brassica Rapa (text by Tim Smit):
The future will show the microbiomes on and in our bodies being mirrored in the soil itself, and I am certain that very soon there will be a moment when we realize a whole new world of science laid open to us and we’ll wonder how we never guessed - but that is always the way with science.”
PT II
Raphnus Sativis: I thought I lost you
Brassica Rapa: Not a chance
RS (UKLG): To make a new world, you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost.
BR (TS): The future of sustainable space travel and colonization will require the involvement of plants…and their next generation of offshoots will build entire communities out of the ingredients they find, wherever they are.
PT III
RS (UKLG): What artists do is make a particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, usually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen to or watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketchmap.
BR (TS): The danger is our hubris of imagining that it is “we” who create these things… In the future, I hope we will watch and learn how nature does it for itself when left to its own devices.
Exhibited at Hopkins Hall Gallery during the 2020 Summer Series