Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Space

Here's what I've been thinking about concerning space (besides those auto-tune videos I posted earlier):

1. Space as the distance between A and B:

These "sound objects" were made using this and one of these.. I know not all of them use distance as a factor (okay, only the bottle-cap one does) but think about things that change based on how far away something is from another thing. That is space

FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS from Georg Reil on Vimeo.

Space is part part of an unavoidable systematic framework for organizing our experiences (Kant) but it's the invisible part. This specific demonstration makes the invisible audible, and even though it mixes senses there is something interesting about trying to make the invisible space something more perceivable to human bodies. It's magic!


Have you read the wikipedia article on space yet? It will make you think.

2.  outer space


Biosphere 2 was built in 1991 to serve as a model for a human colony on the moon or Mars. It was bankrolled by Texan/oil tycoon Edward P Bass and John Allen, aka Johnny Dolphin—a "new age visionary" with a Harvard MBA. It was named after the original Biosphere: Earth. Biosphere means sphere in which life survives.

Biosphere 2 has seven distinct biomes: human habitat, tropical rainforest, desert, savanna, marsh, and a million-gallon ocean. And before being locked in, four men and four women traveled the world to collect 3,800 plant and animal species, to inhabit the biosphere with them


To make a long story short, their first of two years started with El Niño clouds caused reduced sunshine, which slowed photosynthesis in the Biosphere's oxygen-generating plants. When hummingbirds and bees started to die, plants were not pollinated and expected crops failed. The pigs invaded the vegetable garden, until they too died. Mr Allen's friend William S. Burroughs suggested that they take a little monkey called a galagos that screeched through the night during the famine, causing the participants to loose sleep. The chickens laid only 256 eggs in the first year, and only produced more when they were fed cockroaches, which had become ubiquitous.

All the participants lost a bunch of weight, and there was so little oxygen in the biosphere that they had a hard time just completing the day's tasks. (Oxygen was eventually secretly pumped into the biosphere, which ended up tarnishing the whole project's credibility). Jane Goodall visited to observe the inhabitants on the experiment's first anniversary. She saw them hoarding food and noticed that they had split into two separate camps due to feud. They wouldn't even watch their televisions because they couldn't bear the McDonald's commercials.

After the first disaster, they tried again but ended it after 6 months.

I originally read about it in a book from 2000 that said that it was up for sale and I pictured it in ruins—a creepy old building with lemurs and cacti and sharks all just surviving without the humans.. but it is now owned by some ranchers. I can only assume that they're using it to test GMO's resilience to pesticides and lemurs, but apparently they do have tours and there is a whole book out that was written by one of the guinea pigs involved in Experiment 1. It's in AZ, should we go?!?!



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Just that they tried to simulate what (they thought) life in outer space was like by putting everything that they knew was important on earth in the same space, and then everyone starved (el niño's fault or not) and lack of space became a major issue. What Kant said is right: that space and time are not discovered by humans to be objective features of the world, but are part of an unavoidable systematic framework for organizing our experiences. It's hard for humans to grasp the importance of something that is "just the absence of something" but it makes all the difference. Something you don't know is there until you don't have any left. 

Come to the meeting tonight. I talked to the printer, and have a lot to talk about with you guys about the project. See you soon!

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