Urbanite Project!
TEAM 3: Karen Yasinsky and Max Mutchler
Karen Yasinsky is an artist working primarily with animation and drawing. Her video installations and drawings have been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, P.S. 1 in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Kunst Werke in Berlin. Her animations have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art and the International Film Festival Rotterdam She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Foundation grant and teaches at Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute College of Art.
Max Mutchler is a scientist who has been working on the Hubble Space Telescope for the entire twenty-year mission, including the Space Shuttle servicing mission last May. As an expert on Hubble’s cameras, Max has been involved in observations of nearby solar system objects, distant galaxies, and many interesting things in between. He is also a member of the Hubble Heritage team that has produced many of the most iconic images from Hubble.
photo by Lisa Van Horn
Extraordinary Voyages
In “Les Voyages Extraordinaires,” Jules Verne presaged spacecraft transporting people to the moon and imagined submarines encountering strange undersea creatures. His well-known series of novels and stories seeded the minds of future generations who, through discovery and invention, went on to make real much of his creative vision. Less well known is that Verne himself was inspired by the “extraordinary stories” of Baltimore’s own Edgar Allan Poe. What extraordinary ideas could artists and scientists in Baltimore be inspiring in each other’s minds today, which could blossom into new 21st-century realities?
Karen Yasinsky was intrigued by the notion that, in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, scientists don’t necessarily know what they are looking for. We have a handle on the forms of life here on Earth, but does that help or bias our thinking about life elsewhere? Could we be missing the evidence for alien life, simply because we can’t imagine its form and wouldn’t recognize it? What might contact with an alien civilization involve? Such contact might be the most extraordinary event in all of human history, and therefore represents a worthy focus for our collective imagination.
We considered ways to engage each other first, and others later, in the challenge of creating visions of space places, new worlds, and possible intelligent creatures and their civilizations and how they might communicate. Is it possible that the next Jules Verne is lurking in Baltimore, and, with a little encouragement, could unleash a vision of life in the universe that would inspire the next generation to actually find it? As Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling is to have said, “If you want to have a good idea, you must have many ideas.” If enough people employ pure imagination on such a topic, then, like Jules Verne, someone may eventually get it right.
In the last few decades, astronomers have continued to search for life within our solar system. Karen first considered the potential for pre-biotic life on one of the moons of Jupiter. She focused on Europa, because the image of it she found (from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft) looks like a grand, spherical skating palace, something you would happen upon during a day spent walking around through forest and fields, lost in thought.
Astronomers have also discovered more than four hundred planets outside our solar system. Given this growing and varied list of abodes, it seems more possible than ever that life could exist elsewhere in the universe. Life could take on very exotic forms, based on different chemistries and evolving under very unearthly conditions. Contact with such life may not resemble the scenarios that myriad sci-fi novels and movies have depicted.
A story by Steven Millhauser, “The Invasion from Outer Space,” portrays an alien invasion as a yellow dust. This story, and reading about some of the very hot planets recently discovered, inspired Karen to create a claymation character going about her day, walking down the street. Slowly, brilliant dots of colored light begin to fill the sky and descend. Very slowly, everything begins to melt and gently transform. The girl’s outer layer begins to slip away, revealing other colors, and her form changes as well—melting, growing plump and short before sprouting up like a stalk. Continual transformation but some periods are very slow, some faster. Plants and animals, insects, all life is melting and transforming! Buildings crumble, and all plastic and mutable compounds start running together, and we are finally left with a surface of oozing and growing life, without distinct boundaries, alive with the most beautiful colors possible. Surprise and mystification is felt by everyone. But there is no fear. It is all accepted. People just let go and become color.