Here’s a talk I gave this morning at the Artistic Research Forum in Stavanger, Norway. It went well, so I thought I’d share it here. Even if it didn’t go well I’d share it with you.
I tried to make this as performative as my limited capacity allowed, so you’ll find a few stage directions along the way.
Play this video while reading the next part of the text.
I have it! Archemides shouted and ran out naked from the bathtub to tell the king his discovery. He’d gotten into the tub, the water rose. His body displaced the water in the tub. Weight and water. What couldn’t be measured suddenly could.
Weight and air. Archemides’ principle works there too.
I have it!
Stage whisper: Actually, I don’t have anything. For twenty years I’ve been trying to grasp that one thing that will reveal the whole story to me, to you, to us. But it constantly eludes me. So I tell story after story trying to build a structure around that gap. The gap is the source.
Stage whisper, continued: You have to read this part, even though you don’t want to.
Voice of Authority: How do high-flying balloons function as overlooked, yet crucial objects that create narratives about place, control, and knowledge production? My research project, entitled Eureka, relates literary, scientific, and historical narratives from the 19th century to contemporary issues about stratospheric space, utilizing the balloon as a lens, a tool, and an object of inquiry.
Voice of Authority, continued: “The Northwest Ordinance, officially titled "An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North West of the River Ohio" was adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787. Also known as the Ordinance of 1787, the Northwest Ordinance established a government for the Northwest Territory, outlined the process for admitting a new state to the Union, and guaranteed that newly created states would be equal to the original thirteen states. Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, the Northwest Ordinance also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories. The Northwest Ordinance stipulated the creation of at least three but not more than five states out of the Northwest Territory. After sixty thousand people resided in a territory, they could apply for statehood.”
My home state, Ohio, was admitted to the United States in 1803.
This how the land was divided by the people living there first:
This was the land after. And each square was subdivided, packaged, and owned.
In 1818, in the town next door to where I grew up, John Cleves Symmes announced that the earth was hollow. He said if he could get enough volunteers to go to the Arctic, he would prove it. And inside that hollow earth there would be a green, empty land with nobody around, nobody to displace or destroy, a perfect place of calm and green, a place where colonizing would not be so messy, a place so different from where he was living, a place as empty as outer space.
Space Perspective
JP Aerospace
Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 short story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall” is a satire about ballooning. It mocks authority figures while describing in precise detail the impossible physics of ascending from earth to the moon in a balloon. The absurdist tale allows Poe to poke fun at the concerns of earthly experience and to float with hyper-specificity, in that scientific-romantic way that he has. To imagine an escape.
I like reading 19th century American literature first of all because the stories are so strange. And second, to see how authors articulate the period in which the country is struggling to render itself whole. I try to comprehend how the narrative undercurrents express the radical transformations of that time. A similar urgency and desperation reveals itself then as now, how to achieve or maintain standing on a global stage and how to suppress the violence of its founding.
Stage whisper: Always behind, always racing to catch up. So much to learn, so much fake science, so many rumors, speculations, so few rules. Independence, pioneering, staking your claim, ravaging the landscapes, clearing them of trees and of peoples. Nobody knows what to believe anymore.
But why the stratosphere?
The stratosphere is part of our atmosphere right above where airplanes fly. It starts at around 10,000 and goes up to about 40,000 meters. It’s a weird space and still not fully understood. It’s got its own inverted temperatures, winds, currents, and it’s being bombarded by radiation and rays and forces that scientists are still trying to figure out. Things that can’t be named or controlled happen in the stratosphere.
I like thinking about the stratosphere because it’s not fancy like outer space. But lots of science is happening there. People are sending up balloons to do scientific experiments, to do espionage, and soon to do tourism. Balloon technology is a lot cheaper and quicker to do than spaceships, and balloons are launched all the time, all over the world.
I’ve been talking with and interviewing stratospheric balloon people for the last year, including scientists, engineers, aficionados, amateurs, and balloon tourism businesspeople.
In early September I had the privilege of traveling to the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden to film scientists completing experiments that were lifted up to the stratosphere on a giant helium balloon. You already saw some of that footage at the start of the presentation.
And in addition to the documentary material and text animation, I’ve been making hand-processed analog 16mm film rayographs. I couldn’t figure out why I felt the need to make them until recently.
Show this film while reading the rest of the talk
A rayograph is a simple photographic process in which you put objects on photosensitive material and expose it to light. And what you get are shadows of the objects you placed there. This is the kind of filmmaking I started out with. But what it was that drew me back to my beginnings in analog film I could not articulate until I did the shoot at the space station in Sweden.
After spending a week with scientists working on projects about cosmic rays, solar rays, and radiation, I knew what the rayographs were for. They’re my imagined marks on the body of the film material. They’re residual rays, chemical changes in the silver halide particles. Making these analog films lets me imagine I’m up there with the balloon getting slammed by gamma rays while in reality I’m down here processing the film in buckets of chemistry in the photo lab.
For me, the analog material a register of ghosts, a way to envision or embody the balloon drifting up and along the currents of a space I cannot access. What punctures, what penetrates, what irradiates, what kinds of wreckage do I form as I fall back to earth?
One of many things I learned from the scientists is how comfortable they were with failure. Not that they didn’t get frustrated when their telescopes didn’t function or they had to glue something back together or their measurements were off, but how open they were to trying again, to working on it some more. They were not going to throw up their hands and walk away.
At the space center, I promised myself that I didn’t necessarily have to think about making art. I had been so intrigued to see a launch and meet scientists and wanted to try my best to be an observer rather than feeling like I had to collect and “produce” and judge myself as an artist.
The next documentary shoot I’m planning is in 2023 in Nevada at JP Aerospace, whose video you saw earlier. JP Aerospace is an all-volunteer space agency that bills itself as an alternative to NASA. John Powell wants to democratize space science and make it accessible to everyone. He’s been doing this for over 40 years. Powell and his team are trying to perfect The Ascender, a balloon that will be able to supply another balloon that can then supply a station in outer space.
Continuing in parallel with the more abstract aspects of the project, I will be making more animated components based on images of balloon bursts, which to me encapsulate the physics and the poetics of this effort to “master” the stratosphere.
The gases are expanding, I know this feeling. My basket is too big, too unwieldy, too overloaded to fully inflate or ascend. As I keep going, I know I’ll have to drop a lot of ballast, extra material, stories I love but can’t fit in my balloon-basket. It’s part of my process.
The balloon is my prism. It’s my lens. But the perspective is changing as it ascends, expands, and bursts.
This is how I work. While I don’t know always how the current is moving, I do know it is moving. The weather is unstable, the currents run backwards and forwards and up and down.
I’m floating off into the clouds for a while, not sure when and where I’ll be landing, but in the meantime, gathering data—and experiences--along the way.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. BUNKER is having its European premiere in Heidelberg, Germany, on 31 October at 6pm. The screening is co-sponsored by the city of Heidelberg and CAPAS, the Center for Apocalypic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Oh yes, it is real. Click the banner for the link.
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