Greater Earth Energy Synergies
The Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE⊕-LPS) feasibility study funded by the European Space Agency and completed in 2023 represented an art-to-reality evolution of artworks that began with the OURS-Orbiting Unification Ring Satellite, the OUR-Space Peace Sculpture and the Millennium SEED space art projects. These orbital artworks which were designed to be deployed in orbit utilizing inflatable space technologies were continuously developed by adding space technologies and became authentic space projects. These projects have been developed by a multinational interdisciplinary collaborative team effort and are now being exhibited in art and science museums. Arthur Woods, Switzerland – CEO Astrostrom [...]
Cosmic Stones
Will humanity’s future be a “Space Age” or a “Stone Age”? The human species has reached a pivotal point in its evolutionary history, and it appears that the moment has arrived for it to make a critical choice about its future on Earth and, consequently, about its future in the cosmos. This decision could be called the “Cosmic Choice” which conceivably is a choice that all potential spacefaring civilizations must confront at the appropriate moment in their particular history. The Cosmic Stones space art project embodies this decision in a physical and conceptual artwork that literally and artistically combines [...]
Inflatable Technologies for Sculpture in Earth Orbit
A number of artists have made proposals for creating monumental artworks to be placed in Earth orbit which could be seen with unaided vision by those on Earth. While there has been a variety of technologies suggested most of the proposals have utilized some form of inflatable space technology. Echo 2 The idea of using inflatable structures goes back to the first Echo satellites launched by the US in the 60’s – although a number of inflatable concepts for space applications pre-dated these satellites. These were passive communication satellites and carried no other payload. However, they were significant [...]
Why Space Art? = Why Space?
Approximately 100 years ago, at the beginning of the modernist era and of “modern art”, the avant-garde was characterized by its confidence and optimism about the future. They held the firm belief that the industrial age was opening many new territories to explore and that art, in its most noble and explicit way, would find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained. There was no sense that civilization would ever be threatened by the very forces that fueled their optimism. There were no statistics about pollution, overpopulation, ozone holes, and resource shortages to numb [...]
The Role of Art in the Space Environment
Artworks that may be simultaneously experienced by the entire planet represent a revolutionary development in the history of the visual arts. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky wrote: “The great epoch of the Spiritual which is already beginning, or, in embryonic form, began already yesterday……provides and will provide the soil in which a kind of monumental work of art must come to fruition.” The British art historian Herbert Read (1967) has written: “The artist and the community are profoundly interrelated. Traditionally, artists have been channels for the tempo, the tone and the intensity of their society. The function of their art [...]
The Moon as a Cultural Destination
Roger Malina, an astrophysicist and editor of Leonardo – the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, states (1991) : [1] “The creation of contemporary art is inextricably tied to the process of creating human civilization. Within this perspective, art making will occur as a part of space exploration, and in fact art making must be encouraged in space as one of the ways without which, in the long run, human use of space will be incomplete and unsuccessful.” From an historical perspective, the first literary description of trips to the Moon, the Sun, and [...]
