The Story of the Earth
The Story of the Earth concerns the development of planet Earth from its formation to the present day. Nearly all branches of natural science have contributed to understanding of the main events of Earth’s past, characterized by constant geological change and biological evolution.
Domestic catastrophe Nº3: La Planete Laboratoire
in collaboration with Dr. Jean-Marc Chomaz, Ladhyx, École Polytechnique
An aquarium containing a domestic globe, a motor to turn the globe and electronic valve or drip feed which releases a fluoresceine tracing dye onto the sphere. As the sphere turns, the green dye wraps itself around the sphere, enveloping it in what appears to be a thin gas or atmosphere that surrounds the planet Earth. The difference between emissions and atmosphere, the ‘man-influenced’ and the ‘natural’ climate cannot be easily defined.
“Baraka is a documentary that starts from an old word with meanings in several languages. It can be translated as a blessing, breath or essence of life, from where the process of world evolution is triggered. The film reveals how much humanity is interconnected, despite the differences in religion, culture and language of the peoples. A true visual poem without narration or caption, only images and sounds carefully captured and articulated through an expressive montage, which makes each take add the next other meaning, whose theme is… After all, what is Baraka about? I believe that each viewer of the film sees a different theme. It can be about the strength of planet Earth. It may be about the multiple diversities that unite us. It can be a lot. Baraka is a visual reproduction of the human connection with the Earth ”
O’Neill cylinder
O’Neill was inspired by the papers written by his students. He began to work out the details of a program to build self-supporting space habitats in free space.Among the details was how to provide the inhabitants of a space colony with an Earth-like environment. His students had designed giant pressurized structures, spun up to approximate Earth gravity by centrifugal force . With the population of the colony living on the inner surface of a sphere or cylinder, these structures resembled “inside-out planets”. He found that pairing counter-rotating cylinders would eliminate the need to spin them using rockets.This configuration has since been known as the O’Neill cylinder.
Earthrise
With our planet positioned at the forefront of the global agenda more than ever before, ‘Earthrise’ explores the splendour of this blue body we call home by circling towards the amalgamated awareness to maintain the grandeur of the turning sphere we traverse along. In parallel to Van Herpen’s drive towards an interconnected approach to fashion, the 19 look collection narrates the circular processes that usher change in our sentient world by weaving a symbiotic thread between artisanal tailoring and organic craftsmanship, derived from the perception of our world as one living and breathing organism.
Terraforming
The video work “terraforming” focusses on the transformation of a natural environment through energy input. The underpinning idea is that of three phase system change. This begins with the stage of equilibrium where a system is in a certain balance and not changing at all. In the next stage an evolving system enters a state of motion and change where it moves away from equilibrium. The third and final stage is the phase of transformation in which the original system becomes something else. The key element in this transformation process is the sun. This process is called terraforming, whereby a hostile environment, i.e. a planet that is too cold, too hot, or has an unbreathable atmosphere, can be altered to make it suitable for human life. Such a process is not merely a futuristic scenario but represents exactly what is happening on Earth at this moment as the process of atmospheric change brought about by increasing CO2 emissions heats up our planet and speeds up the process of climate change.
video
FILE SAO PAULO 2017
OVERVIEW
Astronauts who were able to observe planet Earth from outer space for the first time, all experienced a strong emotional reaction later called the overview effect. A euphoric feeling of oneness with the planet and all living beings as a collective biotope where ‘my molecules are yours’ and vice versa and individuality seems an illusion.
The Overview-installation consists of a motorized video screen that can slowly pan, tilt and lift. The screen is 3m x 4m wide and has LED light on the backside. An abstracted globe is projected on the front.
TIMÉE
In roughly 360BC, Plato shared his dialogue Timaeus, in which he imagined the universe as a geocentric system, including a concept called Music of the Spheres where each planet had its own sonic tone based on its unique orbital revolution. The entire system was divided into an octave, a fifth, a fourth, and tone, and as all the planets revolved around the Earth, the solar system would comprise a perfect musical score.
SONNTAG aus LICHT
Sonntag aus Licht takes as its subject our solar system and the relationships of all the planets that orbit the sun. In this opera, the earth and life on it is represented as the result of the union of light and water. These two elements are presented in the first scene, and the rest of the opera celebrates the evolution of life, of plants, animals, humans, and above all this the planets, moons, and heavenly constellations. The opera has a pronounced ritualistic and meditative character, with very little that can be described as dramatic action.
Souvenir
Being self-lighted, at the same time that it rotates on its own axis, the object distorts that which it apparently seeks to represent. Therefore, the presence of an inner light, associated with the rapid movement produced by the globe’s motorization, is responsible for abstracting any border line. By fostering the internal luminosity of a planet, which is pure darkness, the work relegates the value of representation to a second level and gives rise to a set of ideas disconnected from the real. In this sense, Souvenir is a means of reconsidering in what way the demarcations that define the geopolitical scenario of this tiny globe are lost in the Earth’s infinite rotativity.
Positions of the Unknown
At the very beginning of space exploration the infrastructure to monitor the whole sky was not yet developed. So in order to find out whether foreign countries launched objects, the US government started to train citizens to observe and detect possible artificial satellites. Scattered over the allied world, these amateur scientists played a crucial part in keeping track of all men-made technology orbiting earth, until “Operation Moonwatch” was discontinued in 1975 […] “Positions of the Unknown” locates the current whereabouts of these mysterious objects by simply pointing at them as they revolve around Earth. Missing the legal proof, those unidentified artefacts remain entities of pure speculation, secret companions of us and our planet. Even so they have been sighted several times and their ubiquitous presence is therefore somehow validated, they linger in a state between existence and non-existence. Quadrature’s 52 small machines constantly follow their paths and serve as silent witnesses of the unknown.
Янис Ксенакис
ヤニス·クセナキス
ANTIKHTHON
In 1971, Iannis Xenakis composed a work called Antikhthon. Commissioned by Balanchine for the New York City Ballet, this overwhelming composition refers to a hypothetical planet, proposed in the 5th century BC. by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus. “Antichthon” is the name that the Greeks gave to a hypothetical celestial object, the Counter-Earth, located between the Earth and the center of the Universe to prevent man from looking directly at Zeus, who had his throne there.
ДЭВИД ЛАШАПЕЛЬ
ديفيد لاشابيل
大卫·拉切贝尔
デビッドラシャペル
Once in the Garden
LaChapelle and the organizers of the Life Ball revealed a new poster inspired by the theme of this year’s Life Ball, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The photographer captures Carrera fully naked, standing in a surrealist eden reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic Renaissance paintings. Two versions of the poster show Carrera alternatively with female and male genitalia. “Gender lines are blurred and every person is unique in how they see themselves,” David LaChapelle explains. “For me the body is more than something to be looked at as an object of sexual gratification. The body is a beautiful housing for the soul that we are celebrating in this picture.”The tagline accompanying the photos, “I’m Adam, I’m Eve, I’m Me” also struck a chord with the model. “Your gender should not matter in your heart or in the way you express your personality,” Carmen Carrera says. “We shouldn’t be afraid to stick to a model, because there are so many types of diverse people on this planet. My message is: beauty has no gender. At the end of the day beauty is beauty.”
Body Systems I
British-born artist Rachel Garrard creates a range of multi-disciplinary work that explores the great unknown, looking to quantum physics and other theories of the universe for inspiration and guidance. Both her video performance pieces and works on paper capture, despite their earthly limitations, the infinite nature of life on this planet and beyond. In a personal statement on her blog, the artist explains “that exploring the outer reaches of the universe can be similar to exploring the inner reaches of the human psyche and that both are governed by the same forces.
Roland Emmerich
In 1994, Egyptologist and linguist Daniel Jackson, Ph.D., is invited by Catherine Langford to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs on cover stones, also known as casing stones, that her father had unearthed in Giza, Egypt, in 1928. Jackson is taken to a U.S. Air Force installation and told by its commander, Special Operations Colonel Jack O’Neil, that the project is classified information. Jackson determines that the hieroglyphs refer to a “stargate” which uses constellations as spatial coordinates. On this revelation, Jackson is shown that the base has this Stargate, also discovered by Langford’s father. They use Jackson’s coordinates to align the Stargate’s metal ring with markings along its outside, and once all seven are locked in, a wormhole opens, connecting the Stargate with a distant planet. Jackson joins O’Neil and his team, consisting of Reilly, Porro, Freeman, Brown, Ferretti, and Kawalsky, as they pass through the wormhole.
CINEMA
ケリーリチャードソン
켈리 리처드슨
קלי ריצ’רדסון/
凯利·理查森
mariner 9
Mariner 9 presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one.
Mariner 9 was created using scenery-generation software employed by the film and gaming industries in combination with technical data from NASA’s missions to Mars to produce a faithful artist’s rendering of Martian terrain, populated by the debris from centuries of exploration through real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a duststorm. “Cinematic tropes of sci-fi films abound, but any search for a clear narrative is frustrated. Presented with minimal action, we wonder instead about the search for life beyond our own planet and the simultaneous destruction of life on earth.” (Laurel MacMillan, Programmer for TIFF Future Projections)