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Swedish artist is trying to crowd-source $15 million to put a shack on the moon because art
05.30.2014
10:17 am
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Swedish artist Mikael Genberg has a vision—a very small, very expensive shack on the surface of the moon. The sculpture (a building you can’t use is just a sculpture) would be in the style of a Swedish country cottage, famous for their striking “falun red” paint jobs. It would be part of Genberg’s larger canon of work, which includes a similar cottage 13 meters up a tree and another, three meters below the surface of a lake. Both of those cottages can actually be visited.

The Moon House however, is not only totally unreachable, it’s completely dependent on crowd-sourcing for its pricey construction. Of the $15,360,000 he needs, Genberg has received $1,816, and he only has 185 days left to raise the cash. For the record, I’m generally in favor of large, ambitious, and yes, sometimes totally expensive, public art. Here’s the thing—this is not public art, and its very nature runs completely counterintuitive to Genberg’s manifesto.

From the Moon House website:

It all began nearly 15 years ago when the artist Mikael Genberg heard about the Swedish space industry plans to build a satellite that would orbit the moon. Four years and one phone call later, had the impossible idea become a reality. The first art project on the moon - a red house with white trim that evokes life in the barren dead moonscape had begun their journey.

The financial crisis affected many. An art project on the moon was no exception. But a new tomorrow dawns in and with the digital revolution and the breakthrough of crowd-funding. Thanks to Falun Red, which in 2014 celebrates its mark on the Swedish province for 250 years, made possible now one of the world’s most ambitious crowd-funding initiative. For the first time in history it is not only the states that make it to the moon. Moon House goal - to put a red house with white trim on the moon - is possible only if the people in the world do it together.

Månhuset is so much more than the first art project on the Moon. Månhuset want to inspire people to break their mental limits and change the face of what is possible. A democratic project in space, where everyone is welcome to participate in creating a unique symbol of what humans can achieve together. Månhuset make space more accessible to all in order to bring space closer to people and people closer to space.

No, space, much less the fucking moon, will not be made more accessible by this project. (Seeing to our woefully underfunded space program would certainly help, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.)

More importantly though, the point of public art is that it can be experienced in some way by the public, so that even if you hate it, it gives the community a collective sense of aesthetic identity—i.e. you can talk with complete strangers about how much you hate it, because you feel some ownership or connection to the work. So no, I will not be donating to Moon House. I would literally rather watch a video of some one setting $15 million on fire—the comment section of YouTube may not be the most sophisticated of communities, but at least that would actually be public.

In the video pitch below, Genberg coos, “everything is possible, as long as we set our minds to it.” While I admire his optimism and don’t doubt the scientific viability of such a project, the question for me is not one of possibility, but one of public worth.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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05.30.2014
10:17 am
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Chinese space babies, the taikonaut tykes of the future!
04.16.2014
10:45 am
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Little Guests in the Moon Palace, 1972 
 
You may recall a post I did a while back on Soviet holiday cards and their predilection for space travel. If you were able to get past the whole “Santa on a rocket ship” motif, you might have also noticed the prevalence of a little boy in cosmonaut get-up, another symbol of the USSR’s vision of an exciting future of fantastic technological advances—one which awaited all good little Soviet children. In the US, of course, the space race was a far more sober affair. NASA didn’t really produce this kind of propaganda, beyond some (admittedly very cool) space colony concept art. So while the US promoted a much more “dignified” view of space technology, Soviet space imagery was much more familiar.

However, Chinese space propaganda makes the Soviet stuff look like military school. Progress is commonly represented by children and technology in a lot of nationalist art, but the Chinese child taikonauts are a step beyond. This stuff is so kid friendly, it had toys, puppies, bunnies, and all manner of toddler-friendly spacecraft. Perhaps hoping to excite the younger generations, these pieces abandon almost any semblance of science fiction and go straight to fantasy. 
 

Take the Spaceship and Tour the Universe, 1962
 

Bringing his playmates to the stars, 1980
 
More space babies after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Amber Frost
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04.16.2014
10:45 am
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Socialism is Our Launching Pad: The Soviet Union’s incredible space program propaganda posters
08.29.2013
11:38 am
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spacelenin
“With Lenin’s name”

The Soviet Union was far ahead of the U.S. in the “space race” of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. By 1965 the U.S.S.R. could take credit for the first satellite, Sputnik-1 (1957), first animal in space (1957), first human in space and Earth orbit (1961), first woman in space and Earth orbit (1963), first spacewalk (1965), first Moon impact (1959), and first image of the far side of the Moon (1959).

As a result Soviet space program propaganda posters from this era were colorful and inspiring. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had Wernher von Braun helping NASA but no artists creating bold, bragging promotional posters like these. Even into the 1970s, all I remember from grade school is a faded poster of moon rocks and the usual “big blue marble” image of the Earth from the Moon.

astronauthammersickle
“Glory to the Soviet people, the pioneers of space!”
 
sovietfairytale
“We were born to make the fairy tale come true!”
 
sovietglory
 
“Glory to the conquerors of the universe!”
 

Above, “Flight to the Moon,” a Soviet propaganda cartoon from 1953

Via io9, where you can see a lot more of these vintage Soviet space program posters

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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08.29.2013
11:38 am
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Sound of SIlver(heads): Rockets on Italian TV 1978
03.06.2011
07:49 pm
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image
 
Here’s a great clip of the French space/rock/sci-fi/disco outfit Rockets performing their biggest hit, a cover of Canned Heat’s “On The Road Again” on the Italian TV show Stryx in 1978. Rockets combined the electronic pulse of Eurodisco with the driving power of classic 70’s rock. Terry Miller, author of the blog post quoted below, sums Rockets up perfectly: “Imagine Gino Soccio mixed with ZZ Top. Interstellar Rock!” It’s camp and fun, if not a little scary due to the matching bald-heads-and silver-skin look, and just how seriously they are taking it.
 
image
 
Like Giorgio Moroder, Rockets had been around for quite a while before finding international success on the first wave of European disco in the late Seventies, even managing to sign to the hallowed Salsoul Records in the States for one album . Although it’s fair to say they were a novelty act, that didn’t stop them from having some seriously bitchin’ tunes. Their front man Zeus B Held went on to produce a number of well known European acts in the 80s, including Nina Hagen and Gina X Performance. From The Stranger’s Line Out blog (by Miller):

In 1972 producer Claude Lemoine produced a single called Future Woman for a band called Crystal. With the single’s poularity the band decided to change it’s name and look, so in 1974 they became The Rocket Men (or Rocketters in France). They shaved their heads, wore matching “space age” outfits and painted themselves with silver make-up. They didn’t quite have the formula right though, unitl 1976 when they changed their name to Rockets. They did a dancier, spacier remake of thier hit Future Woman which brought them, once again, popularity throughout Europe. It didn’t hurt that their live shows were full of lasers, smoke, exploding cannons of fire and a tripped out light show.

I’ll be posting more from Stryx in the near future, but unfortunately most of the footage does not look or sound as clear as this clip.
 
Rockets - “On The Road Again”
 

 
Rockets -“Space Rock”
 

 
Rockets - “Future Woman”
 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.06.2011
07:49 pm
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