At the end of this calendar year, I’m turning my attention to projects I’m continuing or assigning myself for the spring.
Each is a foray into thin air, as most creative efforts are. No guarantees.
Here’s a list that has become a very long essay.
I’m dividing it into parts and will post them over the next few weeks.
Hoping you’ll accept the mission to read along.
I welcome your comments and wish you a wonderful end of 2022.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE:
Log and transcribe footage from Esrange Space Center shoot (Sept 2022):
I’ve been dragging my feet on this because the task is tedious. I open an Excel spreadsheet. I type in time code numbers. I list what’s happening in the shot. For hours, days, weeks.
In past projects, I’ve transcribed verbatim everything the person is saying. That’s how I made BUNKER. And as I am sure I’ve written here before, the task of transcription is something I love.
But as soon as I left Esrange I knew the footage was less useful to me than I had wanted it to be. Not that it isn’t good material, but it feels arbitrary. Why there and not White Sands, New Mexico or Timmins, Canada or somewhere else in North America.
I’m interested in the formal qualities of the objects and materials the scientists were using at Esrange. Yesterday I wrote Carmelo, the engineer from Sicily, and asked him to write me a story about steel.* I also emailed Viktor, the solar physicist at Sheffield, and inquired if he could send me some of the gold foil blanket they wrapped around their half-working telescope to protect it from the freezing stratospheric temperatures.
I’m fascinated by the intense amount of work these people put in all hovering around an open steel cube, for ten days, morning until the middle of the night. And I will never forget the three nights of wondering, transporting, canceling, and finally launching the balloon up up up until it flew out of sight.
There’s beautiful stuff in there. While the shapes, the materials, the feelings are right, the story isn’t. But I need to find those shapes, materials, feelings, or different but analogous ones in the country that I live in, the country that makes no sense at all, the country whose history I do not comprehend yet without which I would not exist.
***
Filming at Area 42 (JP Aerospace Launch Site, Nevada, USA), April 2023
John Powell (JP) and I had another Zoom conversation last week. I’d been hounding him via email for several months and then I got in touch with Dan Bowen, former Google balloon engineer and now startup balloon engineer in SF and maybe Dan reached out to John and told him to write back already, or maybe John just felt like writing back at last.
Area 42 is JP Aerospace’s launch location. It’s a patch of land in the Nevada desert just north of Area 51. John named it Area 42 because it’s 42 acres but also because it is the meaning of the universe as described in Douglas Adams’ great book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy If you have not read it, it’s time.
John is happy for me to come out and film. I’ve got two options, either fly into Sacramento and caravan out to the desert with the group of volunteers and John, or fly to Reno and drive from there. The thing about balloon launches is they’re entirely reliant on the winds and weather. The engineers can plan about when they want to launch, but they can only tell people 7-10 days in advance and then it isn’t sure if it will happen or not. We’re looking at April. He says spring winds are the least predictable. Summer and fall are easier to plan.
Because I’ve been following John on Twitter I knew what to ask about. The Ascender, the commercial film shoot balloon launches, the ikebana artist from Japan who sends up carefully composed flower arrangements, the submarine project. And then there’s PongSat, about which John is the most excited.
PongSat is a free program that Powell offers to schools around the world. Kids can put any experiment they want into a ping-pong ball that’s been cut in half, then tape it up, decorate it, and he’ll send it up to the stratosphere. John says he’s sent 83,000 kid experiments up on balloons since he started the program. I told him I would try to get my kid’s school involved and bring the PongSats out when I come in April.
***
More balloon launches to film (dates & plans: TBD)
Dan Bowen has agreed to let me film a launch by his startup in the Bay Area.
I want to film at Raven Aerostar, the company that bought all of Google’s balloon patents and is now using the technology for U.S. military applications. Their name alone tells a story.
And I am very eager to film at Space Perspective, the stratospheric-balloon tourism company. I am obsessed with their capsule and their constant stream of promotional emails.
This week I got a Space Perspective promo announcing that a $1000 reservation for a seat on their balloon would make a great Christmas present. I am tempted to use research funds for a (fully refundable) reservation, but only because I want to see the certificate and how it will come packaged in a fancy folder inside a fancier box.
In reality, floating to the stratosphere on the inaugural flight of Space Perspective’s Neptune capsule, complete with champagne bar, Star Trek seating, and thermal blankets in the company of a bunch of multimillionaires sounds like a nightmare to me.
A month ago I reached out to a small startup in Denver called Urban Sky. They are offering imaging services from their mini-stratospheric balloons starting at $5 per square mile. I would love to go there and film one of their launches and purchase some imaging. But they haven’t responded.
Dan said he could help with all of the above companies except Urban Sky, because he doesn’t know anyone there.
***
Rocket people, balloon people, and the Large Hadron Collider: a digression
One thing I liked about the conversation with John Powell of JP Aerospace was his way of describing the balloon community in contrast to the rocketship community.
Powell told me about how “rocket people” regard “balloon people” with a measure of disdain, even though balloon technology can do most of what the rockets do but for a fraction of the cost.
John said that Lockheed comes to his company when they’ve run low on funding and need to do experiments to test their equipment. They hire JP Aerospace to send various parts up on his balloons to assess if they’ll function in space.
“It’s $13 million to send up a rocket to do the same thing that we can do with a balloon for $25,000.” John tells me.
But Lockheed gets a percentage of government funding, so when the money is rolling in, they use the expensive rockets.
The other thing I liked was John telling me about the stratosphere vs. the Large Hadron Collider. He says that the same results that scientists are spending years and billions looking for with the Collider happen all the time in the stratosphere. You just can’t predict when those things will happen.
John says he respects the Collider and the scientists and what they do, but wishes people would utilize balloon technology more. Or consider it more as an option.
I sense John loves what he does but wishes he didn’t always have to send flowers or cell phones into space for commercial shoots to earn money to continue his efforts.
I am careening through the skies on winds that don’t match anything happening down below. My basket pitches and rolls.
***
Prototypes: Precision Glassblowing, Colorado, and steel grit ballast
Last week I had another phone call, this with Kai Estey, my contact at Precision Glassblowing in Colorado. I’ve written about Kai before too. He and I never talk for less than 45 minutes. I don’t know what his glassware business was before he started at Precision, but I have a feeling it was for the cannabis industry.
Kai’s originally from New Hampshire, which is another reason he likes to talk to me, someone else on the East Coast who, as he says: “gets it.” “It” being a certain kind of affect, snappy talking, sarcasm.
Precision Glassblowing makes scientific glassware for NASA, JPL, all kinds of science applications. They don’t make stuff for artists. But I have been talking to Kai for more than a year now and he and I get along and so he figures out a way to translate my ideas to his very practical science glassware team. This is what I need.
Kai flatters me all the time and tells me my art is so cool and that he is amazed at how the concept and the idea and the thing I want his glass company to make all come together in one object. He tells me he used to make things for Dale Chihuly and how I should try to meet this person or that person to promote my work.
I confess it feels great to have someone tell me how incredible my ideas are, because I live inside my mind so much that I am often unsure. And I don’t talk to a lot of people about what I’m in the process of making. It’s disorienting; a simultaneous translation.
Kai is also excited because he’s recently had a job redesigning some glassware now being used by Mass General and MIT in Boston and he’s super proud of that. The piece is complex: a glass container used to hold organs as they are being transferred for transplant.
I ask him about his kids and his graffiti wall he has in his house and he says that’s all cool, but things are a little tough with his wife right now. I change the subject. Then we talk about balloons and balloon anchors and steel grit and hourglasses and he sets up pricing and helps prevent me from ordering prototypes so big they’ll break the bank. He says he needs to look out for me that I don’t spend too much money and I agree.
In the spring Kai’s team will make me a prototype of a hollow clear glass anchor, modeled after the 18th century balloon anchor images that Ilan Raphael, the French engineer I interviewed last year, sent me. I wrote about that conversation elsewhere in this labyrinth that is The Beyond Place.
Another glass object Kai’s team will make me is a clear glass model of John Cleves Symmes’ hollow earth. I almost canceled that order because it seemed slightly off topic, but then Kai showed me the drawing he had clearly spent a lot of time on to plan it out and how it would be made out of glass and the measurements and such and of course I could not cancel it because now it’s teamwork and it’s going to be too cool.
Finally, Kai’s team will make me a prototype of a 6 inch glass hourglass filled not with sand but with the steel grit that Dan Bowen told me is used as ballast in contemporary stratospheric balloons. I wrote about that material here, and a few months ago I ordered 5lb of the grit online, along with several different magnets. So maybe it’s cheesy but I am trying to be as literal as possible these days and I will use some magnets on the hourglass to stop or slow the ballast-grit time and see how that works. Play.
I’ve also been using this steel grit to make ballast drawings, yet another way I like to poke fun at or riff on Richard Serra’s oilstick drawings. In past years I made a series of large oilstick drawings, not in the terrifying thick black that Serra uses, but in the different shades of cadmium orange that various oilstick makers produce. I also made them in different reds and yellows in an attempt to literalize one of the metaphors I loved most when I was reading a lot of Henri Bergson. I showed those drawings in several exhibitions, assuming they’d sell like brightly colored hotcakes, but none of them did.
At present I am experimenting with adhesive magnet sheets that a company called McMaster-Carr sells. They offer a roll of magnet with adhesive backing and you can buy it by the yard. So I did, and then made some “ballast pours” to see what sticks and what shape arrives. The pours turn out great, black on black and a bit glittery. Then I glue the magnet drawings onto heavyweight watercolor paper and hang them on the wall. And I like them.
That’s the glass and ballast situation for the spring.
Then there are the photograms. And the crashpads. And the articles & books.
***
TO BE CONTINUED:
*I heard back from Carmelo, the engineer from Sicily, this morning:
Dear Jenny, how nice to hear from you. Really a great pleasure. I'll reply later to your questions as good as I can. Thanks again.
C.
Encounter, curiosity, connection. That kind of correspondence is, for me, as much a gift as anything under a Christmas tree.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER is available to stream via Grasshopper Film at projectr.tv.
Also, I did an extended interview with the Center for Apocaplyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (Heidelberg, Germany) about BUNKER. You can read it here. And Dr. Robert Kirsch, Assistant Professor at the College of Integrative Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University wrote about the film too, here.
Loved this post. Two things come to mind: John Powell's comment about the Hadron Collider vs the Stratosphere reminds me of a similar contrast drawn by Hans Vaihinger in his book As If. A great (if obscure) book about the human need for "useful fictions" in philosophy and science.
The second is more obscure trivia: did you know that Raymond Roussel, the infamous proto-surrealist who influenced many twentieth century artists (Duchamp, Breton, Foucault, John Ashbery) had an idea for a glass-blown hollow form that could be used for insulation? I have the patent drawings somewhere. It was a kind of stackable balloon.