What role do the visual arts play in the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, and vice versa? This book considers the relationship between art practice and space science, presenting new methodologies for art-sci collaboration informed by non-terrestrial contexts.
Regarded widely as an irreverent luxury accessible to only a select few, commercial space exploration seems an unlikely setting for contemporary art practice. However, faced with the inevitability of this developing industry and the new environments it presents, a new field of creative practice is emerging. In
Art in Orbit design theorist Barbara Brownie argues that these new environments offer novel opportunities that are yet to be fully recognized by the creative industries.
Throughout the book, Brownie explores the contexts, questions, challenges and opportunities for creative exploration of form, materials, and the body, in space. Drawing on original research in the STEAM subjects, the book highlights how artists, engineers, and theorists have begun working in close collaboration to reconsider practices that have been taken for granted throughout the history of art practice, demonstrating how ideas about orientation, weight, balance, and the familiar behaviours of art and craft materials are all radically altered in the microgravity of orbital space.
The research presented is supplemented by 9 original case studies from sculpture, craft, performance, and land art, together with exclusive interviews with artists who have produced work for space. Taking an original, critical approach to the spaceflight sector,
Art in Orbit sets out to define a new field of artistic practice and the real-world impact of art-sci collaboration. It provides a template for developing new narrative strategies for space projects which will engage artists, scientists, and collaborative teams from across disciplines.
Brownie, Barbara: - Barbara Brownie is Assistant Dean at the Royal College of Art, UK. She investigates the potential for space as a site for creative practice through research and collaborations within the arts and spaceflight industries. Her last book, Spacewear (Bloomsbury, 2019) explored the effects of microgravity on the dressed body.
Terranova, Charissa N.: - Charissa N. Terranova is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She researches the relationship between culture and science, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory and biology in art and architecture. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016), and the Biotechne series with Meredith Tromble.
Tromble, Meredith: - Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer based in California. Her books, artworks, and performances give form to the links between imagination and knowledge. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies/Art & Technology Emeritus, San Francisco Art Institute, USA.
