Bill Dolson The Reentry Project: Artificial Meteor Storms as Public Art
"Why is there no art in space, why do we have no exhibitions in the sky? Up to now we have left it up to war to light up the sky..." Otto Piene 1961
Reentry is a series of public artworks consisting of artificial meteor showers in the night sky over major cities. New York City is proposed as the site of the first Reentry event. Synthetic meteoroids would be released by an orbiting spacecraft in a prescribed pattern and in a trajectory which would cause them to arrive over New York, creating an ephemeral drawing high in the upper atmosphere as they burn up on reentry from atmospheric heating, in the same fashion as naturally occurring meteors. The piece would be visible for hundreds of miles along the pathway of the meteors, extending along the Northeast Corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.
In addition to the goals of any public artwork; enhancing civic awareness and providing a shared cultural experience, Reentry attempts to create a perception of the extent of the impact of human activity on the environment. Reentry is in effect a deliberate, man-made omen. Like any omen, its interpretations are multiplicitous, however the fact that it is an artificially produced event mimicking an "act of God" is incontrovertible, illustrating humanity's ability to manipulate nature. It is both celebratory and cautionary.
The artist is also a systems engineering consultant working in the aerospace sector. The technology which would be used to produce these artworks has been established with the assistance of scientists at NASA Johnson Space Flight Center. A 501(c)(3), Heaven & Earth Foundation, has been formed as an enabling vehicle, the world's leading meteor astronomer has been retained as Chief Scientist, and the project has received the support of Creative Time. Donations in the form of spacecraft cargo capacity and engineering services are currently being solicited from the aerospace industry. The project has been under development since 2004.
Recent Historical Precedents
Since the beginning of space exploration the atmospheric reentry of man-made artifacts has created what could be considered artificial or synthetic meteors. The pattern and timing of these synthetic meteor showers has been determined as a side effect of other technical or scientific objectives or as the result of accidents. Perhaps the most impressive of these inadvertent drawings have been from the test and subsequent reentry of MIRVed ICBMs, single missiles which could deploy up to ten atomic warheads, the most notable of these being the MX or "Peacekeeper" missile. The breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia on reentry produced a widely viewed example of another inadvertent synthetic meteor drawing.
Cultural Associations of Meteors
Meteors possess a powerful historical presence as omens and signs. Since time immemorial meteors have functioned as symbols of change. Many religions from cultures which are based on a linear concept of time (as opposed to the cyclical time of many indigenous cultures) posit an end to worldly life, an apocalypse. Meteors figure prominently as precursors to such a "Rapture". Apocalyptical and eschatological thought are rooted in the idea of a linear history, an idea which propelled modernism. In the light of postmodern thought apocalypse is perhaps impossible.
This work demythologizes meteors, removing their status as "divine portents", and instead incorporates them into the repertoire of artists' tools and materials. It is anti-apocalyptic in the sense that these works artificially create what once would have been considered a harbinger of the apocalypse, and thus deprecate prophecies of a divinely orchestrated "end of days", rendering them moribund and obsolescent historical fictions. Should a global catastrophe occur, with the leading candidates being climate change or a nuclear/biochemical accident or terrorism, it will be man-made like these synthetic meteors. To that extent Reentry might function as a man-made omen of a man-made apocalypse.
"Darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light." Edmund Burke 1756
Reentry and its visualizations evoke the Apocalyptic Sublime, a British painting genre of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Most leading artists of the time produced works in the genre, including Blake, Turner and Benjamin West. Hugely popular with salon visitors, the movement depicted apocalyptic themes such as The Deluge or scenes from the Book of Revelations, often in a nocturnal urban setting and frequently featuring comets or meteors. The Apocalyptic Sublime emerged during a time of great upheaval and uncertainty in England, sparked by the American and French Revolutions, domestic conflict, and an unpopular expansion of the Empire. Another parallel with that period to our own is the existence of a developed, quasi-religious millenarian movement, not unlike contemporary Fundamentalists' expectation of an immanent Rapture.
The contemporary theory of the Sublime was first characterized by Edmund Burke who described the sublime as those vistas or impressions which at first overwhelm the viewer with a feeling approaching terror. After the initial feeling of being overwhelmed, the viewer then summons their cognitive abilities to organize and assimilate these overwhelming perceptions, thereby extending themselves and establishing a renewed and expanded relationship to their environment. Burke described scenes liable to evoke such a feeling of the Sublime, and these include the night and depictions of cities by night. Early examples of such sublime night cityscapes include Turner's and Colman's paintings of night views of cities in the Industrial North.
These works function as a postmodern Apocalyptic Sublime. Reentry events provide a literal realization of Danby's "Opening of the Sixth Seal", but without divine intervention, without an Apocalypse, without any finality. They are epic in scale but temporally transient and eminently repeatable and reproducible. They celebrate not the end of time, but the end of the concept of the linear development of culture.
Thwarting the Technological Sublime
These works merge the Apocalyptic Sublime with the Technological Sublime. The term "Technological Sublime" was first used by Perry Miller in "The Life of the Mind in America" and then elaborated on by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden". Later, David Nye extended and developed the idea. He explored a variety of developments in American culture since the Revolution which produce a feeling of the Sublime that is technologically based. These include the advent of the railroad, bridges and skyscrapers, factories, artificial illumination and the night cityscape; the atomic bomb, and the Space Race.
Nye differentiates the Technological Sublime from Burke's original description of the Sublime (which Nye calls the Natural Sublime) and suggests that the most recent manifestations of the Technological Sublime do not serve to elevate the individual in their assimilation and understanding of their environment, but rather serve to enhance the superiority and power of the state and the corporation.
One aspect of the Reentry Project is to decouple the Sublime from the objectives of the state or corporation and to erode state and corporate hegemony over advanced technology. The spectacular technology of space exploration is appropriated from the state and the military and stripped of its purported scientific or strategic objectives and used instead for the creation of an evanescent artwork. The result is to expose the mechanisms and affect of the Technological Sublime and spectacular technology, hopefully diminishing their effectiveness in buttressing the power of corporation and state, returning the Sublime to its original role of expanding the ability of the individual to assimilate their own experience.
Defusing the Militarization of Space
The Reentry Project will focus attention on the unorthodox use of space and space launch systems and will illuminate the current rapid and precarious militarization of space, primarily on the part of the US. It has been suggested that the rapid commercialization of space is an effective method of co-opting its militarization and this is an avowed objective of some entrepreneurial proponents of commercial space activities. The Reentry Project proposes an immediate non-military use of launch systems besides space tourism. One possible method for mounting Reentry projects involves the hire of commercial launch systems, thus providing support to these providers. Another even more compelling method to mount Reentry events involves the use of decommissioned military ICBMs, obsoleted by the SALT agreements. This method eliminates these systems from possible future military use, expending them in the creation of an artwork, and quite literally turning "swords into ploughshares".
The Sky/Ground Series
The Reentry Project is one in a proposed series of extremely large scale public artworks employing dynamic geophysical phenomena which are manipulated to produce drawings. Large scale prototypical environmental drawings produced from these phenomena have already occurred as a side effect of human activity and are in fact almost routine. We are now at a point in our relationship to the environment where we are making inadvertent markings at a hitherto unimagined scale. These works seek to produce these markings consciously and deliberately, as artworks, thus enhancing our awareness of those which are produced inadvertently. The current working title for the entire series is Sky/Ground works.
Land Art Precursors
The series draws on the tradition of 70s land art. One intent of these works is to evoke the same sense of daring, audacity, and heightened awareness which the scale of these seminal works produced. These works extend Land Art by either lofting it into the sky and space or creating works intended to be viewed from above. One objective of the Sky/Ground works in common with the original Land Art is the attempt to create works which exist independent of the gallery system and are relatively immune to commodification. This objective of the original Land Art is curiously absent from much of the recent interest in and discussion of that movement.
The Sky/Ground works eschew the permanent monumentalism of early land art by being dynamic and ephemeral. This moderates their vast scale. The idea of an artwork stretching for hundreds of miles is not currently acceptable except on a temporary basis. Why this is the case should be a cause for concern and reflection on the part of artists in an era when transportation and distribution networks like roads and pipelines are routinely built across continents. These works highlight the fact that the scale-space of contemporary art exists within an extremely limited range of the scope of current human activity. Most art is restricted to the scale of the knick-knack at a time when we are constructing massive structures and systems and sending exploratory vehicles millions of miles into space.
Numerous photographic and video visualizations of Reentry events have been produced and may be viewed on the artist's website:
http://billdolson.com/SkyGround/reentryseries/reentryseries.htm
Bill Dolson The Reentry Project: Artificial Meteor Storms as Public Art
"Why is there no art in space, why do we have no exhibitions in the sky? Up to now we have left it up to war to light up the sky..." Otto Piene 1961
Reentry is a series of public artworks consisting of artificial meteor showers in the night sky over major cities. New York City is proposed as the site of the first Reentry event. Synthetic meteoroids would be released by an orbiting spacecraft in a prescribed pattern and in a trajectory which would cause them to arrive over New York, creating an ephemeral drawing high in the upper atmosphere as they burn up on reentry from atmospheric heating, in the same fashion as naturally occurring meteors. The piece would be visible for hundreds of miles along the pathway of the meteors, extending along the Northeast Corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.
In addition to the goals of any public artwork; enhancing civic awareness and providing a shared cultural experience, Reentry attempts to create a perception of the extent of the impact of human activity on the environment. Reentry is in effect a deliberate, man-made omen. Like any omen, its interpretations are multiplicitous, however the fact that it is an artificially produced event mimicking an "act of God" is incontrovertible, illustrating humanity's ability to manipulate nature. It is both celebratory and cautionary.
The artist is also a systems engineering consultant working in the aerospace sector. The technology which would be used to produce these artworks has been established with the assistance of scientists at NASA Johnson Space Flight Center. A 501(c)(3), Heaven & Earth Foundation, has been formed as an enabling vehicle, the world's leading meteor astronomer has been retained as Chief Scientist, and the project has received the support of Creative Time. Donations in the form of spacecraft cargo capacity and engineering services are currently being solicited from the aerospace industry. The project has been under development since 2004.
Recent Historical Precedents
Since the beginning of space exploration the atmospheric reentry of man-made artifacts has created what could be considered artificial or synthetic meteors. The pattern and timing of these synthetic meteor showers has been determined as a side effect of other technical or scientific objectives or as the result of accidents. Perhaps the most impressive of these inadvertent drawings have been from the test and subsequent reentry of MIRVed ICBMs, single missiles which could deploy up to ten atomic warheads, the most notable of these being the MX or "Peacekeeper" missile. The breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia on reentry produced a widely viewed example of another inadvertent synthetic meteor drawing.
Cultural Associations of Meteors
Meteors possess a powerful historical presence as omens and signs. Since time immemorial meteors have functioned as symbols of change. Many religions from cultures which are based on a linear concept of time (as opposed to the cyclical time of many indigenous cultures) posit an end to worldly life, an apocalypse. Meteors figure prominently as precursors to such a "Rapture". Apocalyptical and eschatological thought are rooted in the idea of a linear history, an idea which propelled modernism. In the light of postmodern thought apocalypse is perhaps impossible.
This work demythologizes meteors, removing their status as "divine portents", and instead incorporates them into the repertoire of artists' tools and materials. It is anti-apocalyptic in the sense that these works artificially create what once would have been considered a harbinger of the apocalypse, and thus deprecate prophecies of a divinely orchestrated "end of days", rendering them moribund and obsolescent historical fictions. Should a global catastrophe occur, with the leading candidates being climate change or a nuclear/biochemical accident or terrorism, it will be man-made like these synthetic meteors. To that extent Reentry might function as a man-made omen of a man-made apocalypse.
"Darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light." Edmund Burke 1756
Reentry and its visualizations evoke the Apocalyptic Sublime, a British painting genre of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Most leading artists of the time produced works in the genre, including Blake, Turner and Benjamin West. Hugely popular with salon visitors, the movement depicted apocalyptic themes such as The Deluge or scenes from the Book of Revelations, often in a nocturnal urban setting and frequently featuring comets or meteors. The Apocalyptic Sublime emerged during a time of great upheaval and uncertainty in England, sparked by the American and French Revolutions, domestic conflict, and an unpopular expansion of the Empire. Another parallel with that period to our own is the existence of a developed, quasi-religious millenarian movement, not unlike contemporary Fundamentalists' expectation of an immanent Rapture.
The contemporary theory of the Sublime was first characterized by Edmund Burke who described the sublime as those vistas or impressions which at first overwhelm the viewer with a feeling approaching terror. After the initial feeling of being overwhelmed, the viewer then summons their cognitive abilities to organize and assimilate these overwhelming perceptions, thereby extending themselves and establishing a renewed and expanded relationship to their environment. Burke described scenes liable to evoke such a feeling of the Sublime, and these include the night and depictions of cities by night. Early examples of such sublime night cityscapes include Turner's and Colman's paintings of night views of cities in the Industrial North.
These works function as a postmodern Apocalyptic Sublime. Reentry events provide a literal realization of Danby's "Opening of the Sixth Seal", but without divine intervention, without an Apocalypse, without any finality. They are epic in scale but temporally transient and eminently repeatable and reproducible. They celebrate not the end of time, but the end of the concept of the linear development of culture.
Thwarting the Technological Sublime
These works merge the Apocalyptic Sublime with the Technological Sublime. The term "Technological Sublime" was first used by Perry Miller in "The Life of the Mind in America" and then elaborated on by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden". Later, David Nye extended and developed the idea. He explored a variety of developments in American culture since the Revolution which produce a feeling of the Sublime that is technologically based. These include the advent of the railroad, bridges and skyscrapers, factories, artificial illumination and the night cityscape; the atomic bomb, and the Space Race.
Nye differentiates the Technological Sublime from Burke's original description of the Sublime (which Nye calls the Natural Sublime) and suggests that the most recent manifestations of the Technological Sublime do not serve to elevate the individual in their assimilation and understanding of their environment, but rather serve to enhance the superiority and power of the state and the corporation.
One aspect of the Reentry Project is to decouple the Sublime from the objectives of the state or corporation and to erode state and corporate hegemony over advanced technology. The spectacular technology of space exploration is appropriated from the state and the military and stripped of its purported scientific or strategic objectives and used instead for the creation of an evanescent artwork. The result is to expose the mechanisms and affect of the Technological Sublime and spectacular technology, hopefully diminishing their effectiveness in buttressing the power of corporation and state, returning the Sublime to its original role of expanding the ability of the individual to assimilate their own experience.
Defusing the Militarization of Space
The Reentry Project will focus attention on the unorthodox use of space and space launch systems and will illuminate the current rapid and precarious militarization of space, primarily on the part of the US. It has been suggested that the rapid commercialization of space is an effective method of co-opting its militarization and this is an avowed objective of some entrepreneurial proponents of commercial space activities. The Reentry Project proposes an immediate non-military use of launch systems besides space tourism. One possible method for mounting Reentry projects involves the hire of commercial launch systems, thus providing support to these providers. Another even more compelling method to mount Reentry events involves the use of decommissioned military ICBMs, obsoleted by the SALT agreements. This method eliminates these systems from possible future military use, expending them in the creation of an artwork, and quite literally turning "swords into ploughshares".
The Sky/Ground Series
The Reentry Project is one in a proposed series of extremely large scale public artworks employing dynamic geophysical phenomena which are manipulated to produce drawings. Large scale prototypical environmental drawings produced from these phenomena have already occurred as a side effect of human activity and are in fact almost routine. We are now at a point in our relationship to the environment where we are making inadvertent markings at a hitherto unimagined scale. These works seek to produce these markings consciously and deliberately, as artworks, thus enhancing our awareness of those which are produced inadvertently. The current working title for the entire series is Sky/Ground works.
Land Art Precursors
The series draws on the tradition of 70s land art. One intent of these works is to evoke the same sense of daring, audacity, and heightened awareness which the scale of these seminal works produced. These works extend Land Art by either lofting it into the sky and space or creating works intended to be viewed from above. One objective of the Sky/Ground works in common with the original Land Art is the attempt to create works which exist independent of the gallery system and are relatively immune to commodification. This objective of the original Land Art is curiously absent from much of the recent interest in and discussion of that movement.
The Sky/Ground works eschew the permanent monumentalism of early land art by being dynamic and ephemeral. This moderates their vast scale. The idea of an artwork stretching for hundreds of miles is not currently acceptable except on a temporary basis. Why this is the case should be a cause for concern and reflection on the part of artists in an era when transportation and distribution networks like roads and pipelines are routinely built across continents. These works highlight the fact that the scale-space of contemporary art exists within an extremely limited range of the scope of current human activity. Most art is restricted to the scale of the knick-knack at a time when we are constructing massive structures and systems and sending exploratory vehicles millions of miles into space.
Numerous photographic and video visualizations of Reentry events have been produced and may be viewed on the artist's website:
http://billdolson.com/SkyGround/reentryseries/reentryseries.htm