Terrestrial

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The exhibition that my museum practicum class put on in the Artlab called “together we average as zero”discussed the idea of R. Buckminster Fuller about the planet. A section of the exhibition showed flags that we made with questions about the future. My flag asked “who get’s to colonize space” and “have we lost hope in earth”. Once I saw it hung up in the exhibition I thought more about what my relationship with earth is, and more importantly what my relationship with space. Admittedly, the idea of space shares the day lights out of me. If Elon Musk came up to me and offered me a Willy Wonka-esc golden ticket to his Tesla chocolate factory in space, i’d turn it down and ask to exchange it for store credit.

I stumbled across a video that was called something along the lines of “what mars sounds like?” so I click on it and its “toxic” by Britany spears. The inspiration I pulled from that was trying to find out what different planets sounded like, to my surprise none of them sounded like Toxic by Britany Spears. Instead I found planets that made horrifying sounds that would complement my fear of space. While listening to these planet sounds I found that a lot of them sounded like things on earth. For example, I thought Pluto sounded like the ocean. So I compared the sounds and assigned the left side to space and the right to earth sounds. I did this to help come to terms that I am just a tiny part of the cosmic universe.

I realize how much I am fascinated with Edmund Burke’s theory about the sublime (1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful). I liked Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime, it is, in a concise form, the belief that we as humans like to be belittled, humiliated and humbled by nature. An example of this is that you forget about a midterm when you’re drowning. We become aware of how insignificant we are when we are overpowered by nature. Though I think the idea is thought provoking, I don’t whole heartedly agree. I have a fear of space, the idea of me floating on a ball of dirt in an environment so big I cant even begin to comprehend, scared the hell out of me. I don’t like space , I don’t like the idea of things being THAT much bigger than me. I don’t welcome the idea of being belittled by a planet i’ll never to go. The same goes for my fear of the sea. I think about space as almost a mystical place, a place that had been made up. The idea of space seems man made to me, and will seem man made to me forever because I refuse to go into it. In short, fear keeps me from comprehending space. I always liked the idea of appropriating clips I find on the internet. There are many artists what use found footage as a medium of art and make really thought provoking pieces with it. For example: Benjamin Samuel, Hitchcock 30, 2011 or Les LeVeque, 4 Vertigo, 2000 and 2 Spellbound, 1999 that used Hitchcock films as raw materials. For this assignment, I took the sounds from NASA (free public domain) and paired them with sounds I found on Freesound, a website that other people an upload sounds too. I used this website before, for sounds that I usually couldn’t find or make by myself.

1. Mercury - Industrial buzzing

2. Venus - Wind

3. Jupiter’s moon Europa- Robot

4. Jupiter’s moon- Amalthea - Instrument

5. Jupiter’s moon Elara - Helicopter

6. Saturn’s moon - Titan

7. Pluto- Ocean

8. Neptune’s moon Trition - Fire