Depicting Life on the Moon: An Interview with Tom Gauld (original) (raw)
Related papers
Culture on the Moon: Bodies in Time and Space
Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 12(1):110-128, 2016
This paper investigates whether the term ‘culture’ can be applied to the six Apollo lunar landing sites, and how the remains at these sites can be understood as the actions of bodies at a particular moment in space and time.
Nineteenth-century moon imaginaries in popular visual culture and planetary critique
Nineteenth-Century Moon Imaginaries in Popular Visual Culture and Planetary Critique, 2024
On July 20, 1969, half a billion people around the world watched the televised coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The event triggered a massive circulation of images: not only the moon landing itself, but many other images too, including images of the earth (notably the 1972 photograph "The Blue Marble"), became emblematic of the moon's presence in popular twentieth-century visual media. The moon appeared in numerous movies about space travel, from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995). Robert Rauschenberg's lithograph series Stoned Moon (1969-1970) and Vija Celmins's graphite drawings Moon Surface (Luna 9 #1) (1969) also engaged with the hype around the moon landing. These are just a few examples of the vibrant visual culture of twentieth-century moon imaginaries. By comparison with this twentieth-century fascination, nineteenth-century imaginaries of the moon are often overlooked. 1 The neglect is unjust: there was an abundance of lunar imaginaries, often facilitated by new media reproduction techniques such as photography, precinematic moving images, illustrated newspapers, and early film. Although no one landed on the moon during the nineteenth century, there were dioramas and panoramas of moon landscapes, fairground attractions inviting visitors to experience space travel, newspaper articles about life on the moon, and laterna magica shows about the wonders of the earth's satellite. How did these popular imaginaries interpret the moon? Did they disenchant it, making it a place of strictly scientific investigation? Did they all set out to commodify the moon as an entertainment spectacle? In answering these questions, I will analyze nineteenth-century moon imaginaries ranging from fake moonlight photographs (Carlo Naya's photographs of the Grand Canal, circa 1875) to popular newspaper illustrations showing life on the moon (the Great Moon Hoax of 1835), as well as a very early film about a lunar expedition (George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon, 1902). Investigating these examples, I argue that the popularization of the moon in nineteenth-century visual culture provided a new epistemic lens through which to observe and understand the moon. My approach pays tribute to the work of Siegfried Kracauer, who investigated twentieth-century mass entertainments as surface phenomena (Oberflächenäußerungen). Beneath the surface of popular culture phenomena, Kracauer (1977) discerned the systemic power structures and rationalizations of capitalist materialism: for example, the Tiller Girls dancers' synchronized steps referred to the effectivization of labor in
Review of A Long Voyage to the Moon
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews, 2022
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) Review of A Long Voyage to the Moon: The Life of Naval Aviator and Apollo 17 Astronaut Ron Evans by Geoffrey Bowman. The review argues that Bowman's extensive interviews with Evans's family members and others who knew him provide a both personal and professional account of the astronaut's life and career. The review also discusses aspects of the book that could of particular interests to historians of science.
The author offers a short history of how our perceptual relationship with the Moon has changed over time. Examples of lunar imaging by Early Renaissance painter Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, 19th-century photographer James Nasmyth and NASA's Ranger and Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s reveal ways in which our perception of the Moon has changed. Images of the Moon produced by technology remain far from “complete”—they are akin to fragments, sketches or models, providing information upon which the imagination can build. How we imagine the Moon, the author argues, is symbiotically linked with our representations of it; we only perceive the truly complete, whole Moon in the non-localized zone of our imaginations.
Selenology and the Curious Topology of a Lunar Narrative.
ISEA2014 Dubai: Location
The Moon embodies history, philosophy, cosmology and passions; the nature of love, persecution and our capacity for the sublime. MetaBook: The Book of Luna is a transmedia object that bridges the analog and the digital by introducing a cinematic and interactive dimension to the cabinet of curiosities. This work presents a navigable topology of lunar narratives and maps, exploring texts written by some of history's great philosophers and scientists across a series of embedded media technologies; select works that have profoundly influenced our epistemological, ontological and poetic knowledge of the universe with the Moon as a central theme. By following the craters that have been named for these thinkers, the piece navigates the philosophy of Aristotle and the poetry of Lucian of Samosata, the factual and fictional findings of Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Copernicus, Jules Verne and others. http://www.isea2014.org/en/Submissions/ISEA2014\_Proceedings.pdf
RE:SOURCE The 10th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology Proceedings, 2023
This essay surveys a series of unique media artworks spanning a decade, the Moonwalk series, that combine technology, science, and art in the exploration of the cultural and material poetics of lunar artifacts. These works investigate humanity’s epistemological, ontological, and poetic knowledge of the universe via our relationship with the Moon. They are cinema-installations that take on the Moon as both their subject and the determination of their formal realization, engaging the audience with the poetics of semantic and somatic metaphors. The works in this series are composed of collected fragments of histories, stories, songs, poems, films, and scientific data assembled into lyrical, immersive films. Realized in formally diverse, spatialized projections, these cinema-installations disrupt the division between image and architectural space. The cinema- installations described here occupy domes, spheres, and skylines. They manifest as peripatetic films using the concept of somatic montage, the expansion of the cinematic experience into a supra- dimensional, architectonic, navigable space. Their formal realizations create multivalent spaces that rely on the viewers’ movements and attention to complete their narratives. They merge with architecture and engender psychic associations that echo the Moon’s original form and reframe one’s perception of our singular satellite back into the sky.