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
Karen imagines life in space
animation coming soon . . .
We thought of asking people to create visions of space places, new worlds, possible new intelligent creatures and their civilizations and how might they communicate. I looked at the information available about extrasolar planets and Earth-like moons (places most potentially hospitable to life), but my own predilection toward the surreal and strange presided. I had two ideas.
My first idea was that if life existed in an advanced form, it would be invisible and unrecognizable to the Earth people. We would be such small frys that they would pay us no mind. (Putting these thoughts into words brings attention to our language and its limitations. Our words have meaning only within our context. One thing I loved discovering was the “Goldilocks Zone,” which refers to the most habitable zone in our galaxy: not too hot, not too cold, but just right!)
There is an excellent short story by Steven Millhauser, The Invasion from Outer Space, in the Feb. 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. It depicts an alien invasion as a yellow dust. I like that idea. Reading about some of these very hot planets makes me think of an animation idea I would love to do:
A claymation character is 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. I’d spend some time showing the surprise and mystification felt by everyone. But there would be no fear. It would all be accepted. People would just let go and become color.
My other idea was that if life exists and it can be discovered, it would be on one of the Earth-like moons or extra-solar planets, under a layer of ice. My animation idea is grounded in astronomical research about the potential for pre-biotic life on one of the Earth-like moons or extra-solar planets. I chose Europa, a moon of Saturn, because the image I found 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 . . .
On lovely Europa, we see some astronauts ice-skating. They pass by Robert F. Kennedy skating (only because I like the idea of our structure of time falling apart). The astronauts begin to skate in an oval-shaped formation. They are elegant and fast, their goal being to cut into this ice and find out what’s underneath. Finally, the ice begins to crack and they go around two more times, extra fast, taking care to hold each other’s hands in case anyone should fall. They hop back (again with ease and grace, surprising given the bulk of their space suits). The oval shape of ice flies up and away with some nice sound effects: cracking, rumbling, and other subtly monumental sounds. Water starts to rise up, geyser-like but extraordinarily slow, as if the substance were quite viscous. Fast cuts between a few of the astronauts’ faces. They show delighted surprise! Slow tracking close-up shot of hand squeezes being shared in a mutual moment of awe and appreciation. Cut to long shot. We see all of Europa in space. The orientation is changed, and the water is flowing down and out toward the camera. The water does support life! We see it! It’s fantastic and unexpected! These newly discovered life forms are not bipeds or single cell sloth-like puddle jumpers (see Loren Eiseley’s The Firmament of Time). This teeming-with-life water is filled with old TV fuzz, broken-up pictures out of the past. News, drama (daytime, primetime and late night), talk shows, all of it. But then the fuzz breaks apart as it drifts away in space. At the very same time, back on Earth, TV media images are lost forever; they disappear from all home entertainment centers, computers, and archives. Colored dots and lovely sounds remain. Cut to these dots of colored light descending upon Earth.