spaceship earth

haeckel phaeodaria

copyright buckminster fuller

US Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal

wooden geodesic structure

wooden geodesic structure

copyright buckminster fuller

copyright buckminster fuller

wooden geodesic structure

One of my favourite films and one I constantly refer and return to in my work is Silent Running. The great spaceship “Valley Forge” sets out to save whats left of earth’s ecosystem when man has completely polluted his own planet. Valley Forge is a vessel born out of the eco movement of the 1960’s and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome designs. Buckminster Fuller was a designer and scientist combined and his own philosophies found kinship with the 1960’s more radical philosophies adhocism and the environmental movement. The roots of these movements can be traced back to the dawn of the environmental era where we find inspirational figures such as Scottish born John Muir who inspires with his blend of nature, science and metaphysics.

“I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far! “John Muir

“I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” R. Buckminster Fuller

The geodesic dome represents these two entwined themes, the architecture of the science fiction future/present and the beautiful fragile ecosystem we inhabit/ignore. Buckminster Fuller was truly an inspirational and holistic designer who is too easily ignored while many of todays more celebrated architects build bigger and taller structures that are simply ego trips furthering no future i wish to inhabit.

No matter how far out into the cosmos we travel in our imaginations or our realities, eventually we will have to stop. Back to square one with a new eden to explore. If I was to imagine this new world, the perfect ecosphere Valley Forge’s precious cargo might enable, I’m not sure I wouldn’t feel I had wasted the trip and a whole lot more. When I consider the planet we currently inhabit, pollution and conservation running a ferocious head to head boxing bout with a very uncertain end it reminds me how much damage we are doing as a species. Especially worrying as we don’t actually have anywhere else to go, never mind the means to get there. All around us is wonder, all around us is the paradise we seek elsewhere. In our imaginations, in our science fiction utopias, in our art and our writing we seek the paradise that surrounds us right now.

silent running movie poster

copyright buckminster fuller

copyright buckminster fuller

copyright buckminster fuller

Valley Forge spaceship

seeing

I’ve been really interested in seeing how artists and scientists actually draw the galaxy. These images were created at a time when telescopes allowed a much improved vision of the cosmos to be gained but photography has yet to be invented and did not allow an image to be created with a lens. As always with drawing it is the art of looking that is important, the art of seeing and the act of making marks.

sun spot

the great nebula orion

arabic astronomy

lord rosse telescope

arabic astronomy

sun spot

moonshot

solar eclipse

Etienne Leopold Trouvelot  is by far the most inspiring individual i have discovered. Trouvelot (1827-1895)a French born Astronomer and Artist who moved to the USA in 1852 with his family. His drawings of celestial phenomena were so good that the Director of Harvard College Observatory put Trouvelot on staff in 1872. This allowed him access to one of the most powerful telescopes in the world at this time and was a turning point in astronomical illustration, but in retrospect also in art. These images seems to me to be an influence over many things, visualising sound, artwork for music, abstraction and even cinema. He produced over 7000 astronomical drawings and published 50 scientific papers. His work in astronomical illustration wouldn’t be surpassed until the perfection of photographic dry-plate techniques but in some ways i still think it offers a very different but equally important series of images that explore the act of seeing.

solar protruberance

sun spots

moon craters

great nebula orion

jupiter

mare humorum

aurora borealis

solar eclipse

solar protruberances

sun

sun spots

drawing and space

I’ve always been interested in visualising soundwaves and often it goes hand in hand with ideas about visualising other intangible things we associate with space or physics. My first and favourite piece way before I had even heard of John cage was Peter Saville’s Unknown Pleasures album sleeve. He used an image of radio pulses emitted by CP 1919, a rapidly rotating neutron star or pulsar as they are more often known. In borrowing this image he defined for a generation the dying star and the power of sound.

peter saville 1979 joy division’s unknown pleasures

american scientific 1971

graphis diagrams 1972

_

American avant garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) has been a constant influence on my creativity since i discovered him in art school in every aspect of my life, how i work, how i teach and what i listen to. Cage is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and the figure who most significantly redirected the conceptual horizon of postwar art. He was consistently involved in some of the most radical innovations over a very diverse and experimental career, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Tectonics festival which i mentioned earlier in this blog was started to celebrate his life and work on the centenary of his birth and continues to inspire many music and art fans everywhere.

john cage

musical score

musical score

musical score

john cage

_

This is an odd addition to the set but feels relevant in its lovely link between an image made by radiation and its new function to carry sound waves. These 50s era soviet bootlegs of music the state found challenging to its authority were pressed illegally onto x ray plates. Many oldeR Russians  report that they remember seeing and hearing these discs when they were young. They remind me of flexi discs which were cheaply produced thin plastic records and given away with music publications in the 1980s. The russian discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called ‘Bones’ or ‘Ribs’. In this cold war era when all artforms and communication was ruthlessly controlled by the Soviet State, the black market in music was extremely resourceful pressing alternative vynls from used X Ray plates obtained from local hospitals.

bones

bones

bones

bones

bones

_

“Radiator by Sebastian Sadowski is a web-based generative design application that tries to visualise the individual imagination of radio waves. Radio radiation can’t be seen by the human eye and besides the scientific visualisations, there isn’t any visual language for this invisible electro-magnetic field. However, the aim of the project is to collect as many different kinds of visualisations as possible and give radiation a dynamic, visual face.”  thecreatorsproject.vice.com

This project bookends the soviet bootlegs above very neatly and leaps forward 65 years to create a link that is quite poetic. Where once x ray plates produced or rather carried sound waves we now find radio radiation being channelled into sublime visual wave forms.

_

So much of this sketchbook blog references ideas and work that began in Iceland, Tectonics, sonic art, visualising sound, the landscape itself quite alien to my eyes even though I am myself a northern European Scot. It’s only natural that i would be drawn back to another old favourite the Icelandic sonic explorer Bjork. In 2012/13 she collaborated on an experience based album that links her concepts and her music to a virtual galaxy of ideas and sounds. Many developers have played around with ideas around synesthesia or connectivity between the senses of touch, sound and colour going as far back as REZ, the game designed by sega for the PS2 in 2001, but it has been beautifully realised here as a far more intuitive experience of her Biophilia album. It would seem that the more exciting theories surounding our understanding of cyber space as an actual space are once more being explored  by developers of apps for hand helds. While the corporate or facebook internet is dealing in bland flat interface design theory here again we see the true potential that this technology offers us to morph and expand communication.

“Biophilia is an iPhone/iPad release of Björk’s album created in collaboration with Scott Snibbe and her longtime design collaborators M/M (Paris). Comprising a suite of musical pieces and interactive artworks, Biophilia is released as ten in-app download experiences that are accessed through a three-dimensional galaxy.

Björk has collaborated with artists, designers, scientists, instrument makers, writers and software developers to create an extraordinary multimedia exploration of the universe and its physical forces, processes and structures – of which music is a part. Each in-app experience is inspired by and explores the relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena, from the atomic to the cosmic. You can use Biophilia to make and learn about music, to find out about natural phenomena, or to just enjoy Björk’s music.” thecreatorsproject.vice.com

.

cosmic ray

I’ve been watching a lot of science programs over the last couple of months and relearning a lot of things that my brains chosen to forget since my days at high school with Mr Caldwell my long suffering physics teacher. Most of it is really interesting but one absolute joy I discovered that really fires my imagination is the search for cosmic rays using air fluorescence telescopes. The cosmic rays are described by one particular scientist involved in the search as “messengers, pieces of matter, from other galaxies”.

The thing that most excites me is their initial discovery, first seen by astronauts heading to the moon. The astronauts reported seeing stars in the cabin EVEN WITH THEIR EYES SHUT!

pierre sirkowski with an Air Fluorescence telescope

cosmic rays

gemini astronauts

frontiers of space and knowledge

honeycomb

cosmic rays

There have only been 24 men outside of the earths magnetic protection who have witnessed these flashes, with descriptions of different types ranging from spots, stars, streaks and clouds. One astronaut even observed a flash as “blue with a white cast, like a blue diamond.”

The explanation for these cosmic ray particles defying our eyes being shut is that they are “seen” as they pass through the vitreous humour of the eye (the clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of our eyeball ) and interact directly with either the optic nerve or the visual centres of our brains. There is much speculation on them but they are considered to be particles emitted by super massive black holes.

Ultimately though after the science has explained why this is happening i still find it utterly fascinating, seeing matter, albeit particle sized, with our eyes closed and even while sleeping!

The little gel filled spaces in our eyes become mini screens and create a personal light show that we can never shut off, we are literally seeing the invisible!

the man who fell to earth

vostok1

vostok1 landing module

vostok1 rocket

vostok1 landing

vostok3

Its a long while since I first screen-printed using the character of spaceboy in his russian space helmet and for this project I have found myself looking at images of Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin and Leika the dog once more. In fact the banner image on this blog is the very first spaceboy image I ever made before I even began to draw the character, spaceboy and templegirl circa 2004.

I find eternally fascinating these early days of the space race, the flimsy space craft seemingly made out of tinfoil and the gungho spirit of the early cosmonauts. The image above shows the lifepod that nearly burned up entirely on the re-entry of Vostok 1. Gagarin almost perished as the circular landing module wouldn’t separate from the last piece of the re-entry module and the parachute couldn’t be deployed. Yuri saw flames licking all round the craft and eventually had to parachute from the module as the fireball hurtled to the ground. Both parachutes eventually opened, Gagarins and the lifepods but it was a near miss and sums up the pioneering spirit of the men involved in these early space flights. Tragically Yuri Gagarin was killed seven years later and as strange as it seems it was during a routine MIG jet training flight not in the black depths of space. Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space and Leika the first dog in space preceded him. I love the image of him floating down on his parachute still clad in his smoldering space suit to land beside the charred remains of Vostok1. The Icarus myth thwarted temporarily as he made it down again.

When i first drew spaceboy it was an attempt to create a cypher for existential loneliness and disconnection. this project explores something quite the opposite a universal connection and a bond through the higher emotion of love. its quite odd to be revisiting these images and to be driving them in an entirely new positive direction.

leika

yuri gagarin

the fall – mike inglis

heartbeat

I stood in the projection of Jeremy Blake’s Winchester redux as I tried to sear it into my memory, its images playing over my skin. Hypnotic, bewildering and hallucinatory influenced as much by MTV as by the rich lineage of experimental film makers it joined. I noticed his extremely short timeline but only after searching him out in cyber bubble land did the true tragedy reveal another side to the power of love.

winchester redux detail

winchester redux

winchester redux

jeremy blake

Jeremy committed suicide a week after his artist girlfriend Theresa Duncan tragically took her own life. So linked were they in life he couldn’t face the trip without her. The last image at the end of this post is a photograph of the couple taken by artist Dario Robleto, part of his project to collect the heartbeats of 50 lovers.

“Hearing Jeremy’s heart like this was amazing,” Duncan wrote on her blog, “like staring through a telescope at a vast and previously undiscovered world. The beats sounded so powerful, and yet so temporary. We are just another damn song …”

dario robleto portrait – jeremy blake and theresa duncan

They died within a week of each other, Jeremy walked into the sea the day before her funeral. Love binds, love blinds, love burns, love breaks… Jeremy and Theresa were together for 12 years. Jeremy Blake (1971–2007) is best known for his video works and his collaborations with filmmakers and musicians. His works were selected for the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2000, 2002 and 2004. Like his hauntingly beautiful work their story puzzled the world who speculated and spun rumours but for me its a simple reminder to fragility of life and love. Their two heartbeats living on in another artists project and a touching image of life’s transience.

.

soul vibrations

When I first heard about this project my mind was elsewhere – connecting to the natural world on a far more visceral level, stomping around in the woods, kneeling in the dirt and actually finding new connections and ways of living. Looking out into the cosmos and the clinical laboratories of optical engineers did not initially inspire me at all. It wasn’t until I cast my mind back to my trip to Iceland last spring and my fruitless search for the aurora borealis that I realised I had been star gazing all along even creating paintings of this combining spray paints with bootlace fungus. My trip to Iceland was fruitful in many ways – there was an inspiring exhibition exploring the relationship we have between sound and image, visual music if you like and also Tectonics sound festival which was as momentous as it sounds. It was here I discovered Alvin Lucier.

wire installation halpern

alvin lucier

on stage at halpern

acoustic teapot

notes for wire

At tectonics I watched a seemingly gentle old man amble slowly onto a stark stage where he fiddled around fixing wires to his temples, adjusted comfortably his 80s style headband and promptly closed his eyes to quietly meditate. Once he reached a suitable state of zen calm he began to control various percussion instruments around the room with the frequency of his brain waves. It was thunderous, intense, unexpected, and extremely powerful and effectively it blew my mind. I also stood completely energised in a public space by his installation piece “music on a long thin wire“, my entire being vibrating from the deceptively simple installation of an amped wire vibrating through speakers, glass, bone and concrete. Alvin lucier had crashed into my consciousness!

In the nearby Reykjavik art museum I found the work of Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) his work equally as inspiring as Alvin’s sound pieces. He created a device, a musical instrument if you like but one that plays light instead of sound! His device is called the clavilux and there were twelve created in total although only six working “instruments” still exist.

thomas wilfred

performance

opus 161

opus 161

thomas at the keyboard

Looking around online investigating frequencies and healing I found the following abridged (mis)quote that I keep reposting to remind myself of something essential I am missing.

‘… the law of vibration, a law which states that nothing rests ….  suggesting that if a frequency is vibrating fast enough, it’s emitted as a color of light…. so if a pianist could press a key way above the eighty-eight keys that exist on a piano, that key would produce light….’

It inspired me to write; “ I want a light piano that emits joy ” it would appear that Thomas Wilfred had the same thoughts a hundred years before. Thomas Wilfred also practiced Theosophy, an esoteric philosophical system of beliefs seeking to understand the mysteries, origins and purpose of the universe in an attempt to provide us each individual enlightenment.

Both of these men found ways of producing art, which connected, healed and uplifted in a way that my experiences of being immersed in nature did also. I had found something in Iceland elemental, the landscape, the modulating frequencies of Alvin Lucier and the most intimate colour fields of a Danish born American pioneer of the art of light Thomas Wilfred.

voyager

This research will take many twists and turns but the essence of what i am trying to explore is completely inspired by the creative response of Ann Druyan the wife of Carl Sagan who made recordings of her brainwaves and heart rates in an attempt to define what it felt like to be in love for the cultural time capsule the golden records which Voyager 1 now carries as it now leaves our galaxy travelling into deep space on a journey that began in 1977. Carl Sagan died in 1996 but the recordings of their love still flow out into the void on an eternal voyage through the cosmos.

Anne’s own feelings on eternity and love :

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”