Outer space hats: inspiration for a drab Monday.

Who knew space millinery was a thing?

Below are two 'outer space hats' by the French designer Hubert de Givenchy (who died in March 2018). They're less space hats than space agey, though.

Image courtesy of  Conde Nast

Pierre Cardin loved a space hat. This one was made in 1965 and exhibited in Paris Refashioned 1957-1968, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

According to the exhibition catalogue,

Molded felt hats that resembled space helmets became a signature of Cardin’s work during the 1960s, yet the designer had introduced the style as early as 1958. Vogue described a hat from that year as 'a unique Cardin projection into outer space,' underscoring the couturier’s early interest in futuristic design.

These Pierre Cardin sun and moon helmets are pretty groovy too.

Pattie Boyd and  Celia Hammond model the helmets. Photo by John French.

What, I wonder, is space fashion for the era of commercial and private space?

My mama told me never trust a space engineer

My recent space girl dance research led me to this cruisy number by The Imagined Village. (Lyrics underneath).




Space Girl

My mama told me I should never venture into space
But I did, I did, I did
She said no terran girl could trust the martian race
But I did, I did, I did

A rocket pilot asked me on a voyage to go
And I was so romantic, and I couldn't say no
That he was just a servo robot how was I to know?
So I did, I did, I did

She told me never venture out among the asteroids
But I did, I did, I did
And she said that the Milky Way was something to avoid
So I did, I did, I did
She said that Venus was too hot and Saturn not much fun
And bug-eyed monsters tended to be just a trifle dumb
She said I'd need a blaster and I'd need a freezer gun
And I did, I did, I did

My mama told me never trust a space engineer
And yes, I did, I did, I did
She said freefall and superdrive would surely cost me dear
And yes, they did, they did, they did
I've been as far in hyperspace as anybody can
I've travelled through the time warp in the Psycho Plan
They say a gal must travel for to find her superman
And yes, I did, I did, I did
And yes, I did, I did, I did
Oh, I did, I did, I did
Oh...

Space girl dance

Marko Lulic is a Viennese artist who created a three minute video called Space-Girl Dance, which was exhibited at the Sydney Biennale in 2014. I wish I had been there to see it!

Image: Marco Lulic and Gabriele Senn Galerie, Vienna

Sadly, the dance did not take place on Cockatoo Island (where it was screened). It was filmed in the garden of German sculptor Eric Hauser. The garden contains spacey stainless steel sculptures, which form the setting for the dance.

Image: Marco Lulic and Gabriele Senn Galerie, Vienna

The dance and video were inspired by a segment in the 1970 US television series Raquel!, starring Raquel Welch. The background for Raquel's Space-Girl Dance was a set of sculptures commissioned to commemorate the 1968 Mexican Olympic Games, called the Ruta de la Amistad (Friendship Road). Now, many of the sculptures have been vandalised and are in poor condition.

Here is one of the spacey sculptures on the Ruta de la Amistad.

Image from http://www.reporte.com.mx/

According to the Biennale notes, Lulic was interested in the relationship between the copy and the original, but also

the relation of the body to space, movement to stillness, human to monumental, and the man-made to the natural world.

I feel a Dr Space Junk Dance coming on.

You say potato, I say citizen of Mars. Space travel in the vegetable kingdom.

One of the things I love about my particular niche in the space world is that it brings me into contact with artists working in science and technology. This kind of interaction is also a feature of the archaeology of the contemporary past. I like to think that both are about the transformative potential of material culture.

In 2010, artist Jonathon Keats created the Local Air and Space Administration (LASA) and launched the research careers of vegetable astronauts. This project has always appealed to my interest in amateur, popular, citizen engagement with space and I've been meaning to write about it ever since.

Ostensibly, Keats was frustrated by NASA's abandonment of interplanetary exploration back then and decided to take matters into his own hands. Without launch capability, he had to take a novel approach: don't go to the stars, explore the star stuff that has come to us.

I took an ordinary chondrite meteorite and smashed it with a hammer, and then I planted these two cacti in the rubble since cacti sometimes grow in rocky soil. They lived on the asteroid isolated under a bell jar for twenty-one days, exploring the alien terrain by osmosis. The total cost was around $25, plus $2.99 each for the cacti (Interview, 21 October 2010).

Succulent space travellers. Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

The technique of simulating alien environments was then repeated using minute quantities of lunar anorthosite (from meteorite NWA 482) and Martian shergottite (from meteorite NWA 1195). The meteorites (presumably) also contained nanodiamonds composed of dead extra-galactic star material. Keats created mineral water from these materials for potato astronauts suspended by toothpicks to osmotically explore. As he said,

The technology is fairly rudimentary – mostly just a funnel and some coffee filters – but anybody who's watched Apollo 13 knows that complexity can be deadly.

Spuds in space. Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

By incorporating the exoplanetary minerals, Keats argued that the potatoes were being transformed into aliens. 'On certain matters, such as the nature of Mars', he said, 'potatoes now know more than we do'.

Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

Space travel wasn't just for the succulents and spuds, though. Keats mounted a chair on pieces of meteorite and embedded more pieces into the soles of slippers: in this way, on rising from the chair and putting on the slippers, any walk you undertook was a space walk.

And by imbibing the lunar, stellar and Martian mineral waters, sold for a 'reasonable price' by the LASA Exotourism Bureau in San Francisco, humans could also be transformed into alien hybrids.

There's so much I like about this project. I have to confess that I struggle with the idolisation of astronauts; there's something about the predominant narrative of the white, male colonial frontier hero that I find irritating. (The greater diversity of astronauts these days has dulled but not eclipsed this trope). There's a wonderful subversion in claiming these qualities for something without a brain. Keats says: 'here's the chance for children to look up to potatoes as heroic, just as John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin were once role models'.

Spacewalk slippers. Photo by Carolyne Zinko.

'Bargain basement procurement' is a model of space innovation that I admire because it makes space accessible. One of my all-time favourite spacecraft, the Australis Oscar V amateur satellite, was built using begged, borrowed, and off-the-shelf hardware store components. Similarly, Keats created a space programme with approximately $200 USD. He bought the meteorite fragments on eBay, and the hammer to smash them up with.

It's also about the materiality. The tiny bits of interplanetary, interstellar star stuff, even if you can't see them dissolved in the mineral water, have a talismanic quality. By their authenticity, they can transport you to other worlds. It's you who does the thinking, but the particles from outer space are like scrying crystals that focus your inner gaze until your insides are turned inside out and expanded to fill the universe. You become a TARDIS.



What's the point? you may ask. Keats says:

I think it has the potential to change your perspective on everything, from immigration policy to the environment to what it means to be human.

It does indeed challenge some of the conceptual underpinnings of our current interactions with space. Do the cacti and potatoes acquire rights to space through this process of hybridisation?  Keats argues that they do:

Of course by colonialist standards, potatoes will have territorial claim to Mars since they've beat Homo sapiens, and what's most hospitable to them may be to inhabit it without us around.

I have bad news for Keats, though. He was not the first to train vegetable astronauts. In 1968, Mr Potato Head went to the Moon.

And now cucumbers are in on the action! From Tracy's Toys (And Some Other Stuff)

Naming a crater on Mercury and the politics of Indigenous identity

The Mercury-orbiting Messenger spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA, the Carnegie Institute for Science, and the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As part of the celebrations, they're having a competition to name a crater (it closes on 15 January 2015).

It's a celebration but it's also a swan song. Somewhere around March this year, the plucky little spacecraft will run out of fuel and end up as a smear on the planet's surface.

Features on our solar system's innermost planet are named for artists. There's five craters that need names. This is how it works:

According to the IAU rules for Mercury, impact craters are named in honor of people who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to the Arts and Humanities (visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, architects, musicians, composers and so on). The person must have been recognized as an art-historically significant figure for more than 50 years and must have been dead for at least three years. We are particularly interested in submissions that honor people from nations and cultural groups that are under-represented amongst the currently-named craters.  See the current list of named Mercury craters.

I was lying in bed one Saturday morning, lazily turning various thoughts over in my mind, when inspiration struck. I should propose the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira.

Most Australians would be familiar with his work, even if they're not aware who the artist is. Here's a couple of examples:

Alice Springs Country. Watercolour on paper, by Albert Namatjira. Credit: Australian Art Auction Records

The Finke River Gorge at entrance to Glen Helen. Watercolour and gouache over pencil, on paper.  Credit: Queensland Museum

I thought Namatjira would be a good name for Crater C, which has yellow-orange volcanic deposits, not unlike the colours of central Australia in the scenes that became Namatjira's most iconic. And Aboriginal people are definitely an under-represented group in the names not just on Mercury, but in the rest of the solar system.

On looking up the list of existing names, I discovered that there are two Australians already on Mercury (so to speak). They are Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett, a painter, and James "Frank" Hurley, a photographer, and both fascinating people in their own right as you can see if you follow the links. One criterion was met already: only two Australians in a gazetteer of 372 names, and neither of them Aboriginal.

So I started researching and writing, and finally submitted the following 2000-character blurb on Namatjira:

Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) was an Arrernte man born in the Northern Territory of Australia. He was the first Aboriginal artist to become well-known to the white Australian public, and his work won international acclaim. Growing up on the Hermannsburg Mission, he was initiated into Aboriginal cultural law at 13.  In his 20s he learnt to paint from artists visiting the mission and quickly became proficient. His first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1938, and a school of artists built up around him. His paintings represented the colours of the Australian landscape like no other. His distinct style combined Aboriginal approaches to country with modern European landscape painting. He is best known for his paintings of the McDonnell ranges. In his lifetime he received honours such as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation medal (1953) and honorary membership of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales (1955). In 1968, he was the first Aboriginal person on an Australian postage stamp. As an Aboriginal man of this era, he experienced the tensions between expressing his Aboriginal identity and Australia’s administrative regime which tightly controlled the freedoms of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, he became one of Australia’s most well-known and popular artists with his work represented in major galleries. In 2002, the National Gallery of Australia mounted a major retrospective of his work. This is how they described his art: 

"Namatjira's paintings express his relationship with the Arrernte country, particularly the Western Arrernte lands, for which he was a traditional custodian. Through his intense scrutiny of specific places and his sensitive response to their individual qualities, Namatjira enables us to see the Centre as a multi-faceted region of Australia. A region of extremes, central Australia is far from a 'dead heart'”. 

These words could equally be applied to Mercury: the eye of the artist allows us to see beyond the superficial to the complexity within.

For more details, see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which was a major source for the above.

My opinion is that this is an absolute winning proposal, and I really hope the committee thinks so too.

It's interesting, though. The rules of naming are very clear: the name should not have any 'political, religious or military significance'. That's fine as it stands. And Albert Namatjira wasn't a general, or used as a rallying point for radical Aboriginal resistance, or the centre of a cult. Events on Earth won't be upset by having a crater named for him.

But he was an Aboriginal man who lived through a period where Aboriginal people were treated like livestock, and were assumed to be on the verge of extinction. He grew up on a mission, one of the aims of which was to Christianise Aboriginal people and destroy their culture. (You'll notice my subtle attempt to describe these complex issues in the submission). He was treated as if he had given away his Aboriginality by working in a contemporary modernist tradition; yet if he had painted in a 'traditional' way, he would have been constructed as 'primitive'. You can read about how Australia's policies about Aboriginal people affected his life in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

The International Astronomical Union, which administers the naming of planetary features in the solar system, is definitely right to be targeting groups who are marginalised or overlooked.

But there is a sense in which just being Indigenous in the modern world is already political. You can't be neutral as an Indigenous person in a colonial society. The very act of becoming outstanding in some way only serves to bring into sharp focus the inequalities that exist, and Namatjira's life illustrates that.

I hope I've walked the fine line of acknowledging the appalling treatment of Aboriginal people in White Australia while representing Namatjira for what he was: a brilliant artist with a unique vision who deserves to immortalised on Mercury.

Keep your eyes out for the results of the competition in late March/early April!

Insert Namatjira's name here.



Image credits:

1. Australian Art Auction Records

 http://www.artrecord.com/index.cfm/artist/478-namatjira-albert/medium/2-works-on-paper/?page=9

2. Queensland Museum.

 http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/collection/indigenous_australian_art/albert_namatjira

3. Enchanted Learning

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/mercury/mercurymap.shtml

Performing the Moon: Tranquility Base and témoignage

Sometimes simple thoughts can take a long while to catalyse.

Last year, Dr Jonathan Bollen, Head of Drama at Flinders, did a joint seminar with me based around the ideas in Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson's Theatre/Archaeology (2001). Among other things, I remember talking about the spectacle of the rocket launch and the fact that a rocket is actually a very ephemeral entity, only being assembled prior to the launch, and disintegrating during it as the various stages separate. All of this is watched by people in control rooms, tracking stations, and at the launch site, as you see in the photo below.

Lyndon B. Johnson and Spiro Agnew watch the launch of the Apollo 11 Saturn V. NASA/Science Photo Library

On Tuesday this week I gave a guest lecture to a Screen & Media class about Indigenous media. For this, I looked at how Aboriginal groups in Canada and Australia had used satellite television creatively to support their cultures. As historical background, I mentioned the concomitant growth of global television with the use of the geostationary orbit, as exemplified by the estimated 600 million people who watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969.

And today, I'm having a 'mini writing retreat', locked away in a bare seminar room with one of my students. I'm reading a PhD thesis by Fiona Campbell and Jonna Ulin called Borderline Archaeology. A practice of contemporary archaeology - exploring aspects of creative narratives and performative cultural production (Gothenburg Archaeological Thesis No 29, Goteborg, Sweden, 2004).

Two quotes discussed in their book really spoke to me. In 1899, Canadian historian William F. Ganong made a remarkably prescient statement about how archaeology should be done:

Unlike some other phases of history, archaeological studies .... should be undertaken as soon as possible after the events have occurred, for their evidence is found not so much in documents reasonably sure of long preservation, but in perishable materials and alterable localities.

Spot on, I thought. There is no necessity to wait around for the place or the junk to acquire some archaeological credibility - we should be leaping right in after the last participant has left the site and collecting their garbage! This kind of thing was the topic of conversation on the CONTEMP-HIST-ARCH email discussion list after the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. A few people thought this was a lost opportunity to do some really creative contemporary archaeology on the streets where swarming crowds of people gathered to watch and celebrate, precisely the kind of thing that we ought to be all over .... but alas, contemporary archaeologists were glued to the telly with the rest of the world ....

Campbell and Ulin's referencing is a little patchy, so I'm not precisely sure where the next quote came from.  They say 

David Schneider has described performance as 'organised human behaviour presented before witnesses' (Campbell and Ulin 2004:26).

I was thinking of Tranquility Base while reading all of this, particularly as Beth Laura O'Leary and I have recently finished writing a piece where we talk about the archaeological value of Tranquility Base as a site. I thought to myself: the entire Apollo moon landing was a performance by this definition, being organised to the most minute level, and witnessed by the largest audience in human history. And in fact, looked at from this perspective, the structure of the site is dictated as much by the requirements of the performance as the actual scientific work that was to be carried out there. Or perhaps it is truer to say that the actual scientific work cannot be separated from the performance of being the first humans on another planet.

There's also, I think, a fine dividing line between being witnessed, and being surveilled. The astronauts' bodies were being constantly monitored, as were their every action and word; they had a tight script for all actions they undertook and what they said was of the utmost importance.  The stage and the prison of their suits and lander were one and the same.

This perspective makes me see a new dimension to how one might analyse the actual traces left at Tranquility Base, the bootprints, tracks, furrows, pits, discarded materials. I would always have argued that this was an archaeological site like any other, that can be mapped and analysed (well, if one could do this remotely), but exactly what we could learn from this, I wasn't entirely clear. One obvious thing is the difference between what the astronauts actually did and what they said they did, but I don't know why we want to know that ... and of course there are no similar sites to compare. Maybe this is partially the problem.  

But hang on. We do have similar sites, just on terrestrial landscapes. We do have places where humans landed in hostile, unknown environments and carried out a series of actions, frequently with some scientific objective (eg Cook and Banks, that French bloke in Tasmania), and sometimes watched by Indigenous and other inhabitants. Would it be interesting to compare the use of space in such places? Did the strangeness of the environment make people move carefully and always within view of each other, for example?

But to get back to my main point, if I think of Tranquility Base as a performance dictated by the needs of the witnesses, then the trails left by the astronauts tell us something about the expectations of those witnesses, scientific, political and public, rather perhaps than the agency of the astronauts themselves. In this sense, can we compare their movements to those of robotic missions on Mars? Are there any similarities or differences between human and robotic engagements with planetary landscapes and is there anything interesting to be learnt from this comparison?

Beth O'Leary makes the point that at Tranquility Base we have a well preserved site which can be viewed remotely, together with the documents of the mission AND the film footage. This is a rare opportunity, then, to study the site as a performance: to compare the experience of different witnesses who have access to different versions (the astronauts see each other, the public see it on television, the tracking station and NASA staff see the raw data, the journalists edit and re-represent it), taking as one of those versions the site as it becomes after the astronauts leave: a flat, two-dimensional record of a multi-dimensional event which took place over many hours, a lasting trace of ephemeral movements and intentions.

Well, we're only fifty years or so late to realise the archaeological potential of Tranquility Base, but we're working on it.  The next time people go to another planet, perhaps we should mobilise a bit earlier ......

References
Ganong, William F. 1899. A Monograph of Historic Sites in the Province of New Brunswick. Proceeding and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 2.

Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks 2001 Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge

Space-craft: rockets, jetpacks, and other DIY space paraphernalia

I do love a bit of space craft. These delights have popped up on my radar over the last couple of days as I have been confined to bed, the result of some pre-winter disease, and with my brain unable to process anything work-related (until this morning), there has been quite a bit of mindless internet roaming and DVD watching going on. (And more toast and Nutella than a person really needs).

This beautiful rocket bookcase was made by Jesse Harrington, who is, according to their profile, a 31-year old robot. If you're lusting after this as much as I am, you can find instructions about how to make it at Instructables.  I fear it is a bit beyond my skills.

This, however, is more like it. Over at Doodlecraft, Nat has made a wonderful rocket-powered jet pack out of two plastic drink bottles, coloured felt, silver paint, tape, cardboard and hot glue. This would gladden any space nut's heart.

For some serious geekery, check out Greg B's Apollo astronaut costume:

If you want to have a go at making this costume, full details can be found here.

This one is hardcore: Sputnik in a biscuit tin.  

1. Tomy baby monitor - transmitter and aerial

2. Wireless router - backup transmitter and aerial

3. Mercury thermometer - temperature sensor

4. x4 large batteries - power supply

5. Balloon - pressure sensor (expands and pops if case punctured)

6. Power-pack - backup power supply

7. Domestic thermostat - activates fan and changes radio signal

8. Battery powered fan - moves heat to casing (once tin lid is on)

9. Biscuit tin with foil - houses components and reflects solar radiation

In 2007, the BBC News Magazine issued a challenge to create the equivalent of a Sputnik satellite using just stuff from about the house:

There are transmitters in mobile or cordless phones, wireless internet routers and baby monitors, and you may well have a thermometer in the medicine cabinet.

A party balloon can act as a simple pressure switch of sorts - a partially inflated one would certainly expand and burst if the pressure outside dropped to zero. And temperature switches can be found all over the house, including in the thermostat for the central heating system, or in the electric oven or washing machine. 

Electronic gadgets contain batteries, and fans can be found in home computers or the kitchen extractor. The only thing you may have trouble laying your hands on is a large metal sphere with whiplash aerials poking out. 

This is where your biscuit tin comes in. No whiplash aerials, but it makes a spiffy housing for all the components. As Paul Rubens, the author of this article, said, it really is incredible that technology which barely existed 50 years ago is now part of every household (well at least in some parts of the world). 

And finally, you wouldn't know you were chez Dr Space Junk unless there was a splendid rocket cake.  This one is truly ....  something else.  

Apparently, they are meant to be rockets. Of some kind. This cake was made for a Fourth of July celebration in the USA and comes to Space Age Archaeology courtesy of the marvellous Jen and her team over at Cake Wrecks (When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong). Freud could go to town on this one.

Well, now it's time for me to venture out of bed and persuade myself that fruit is a better option for a sick person than more toast with lashings of butter and Nutella. Wish me luck.

The art of Dr Space Junk #1: the Cosmic Sieve

Years ago, I was a young archaeologist-about-town in Sydney, working mainly in Indigenous heritage management, but sometime historical stuff too (eg First Government House). I also held various positions on the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists, such as NSW State Representative and Newsletter Editor. It was while doing the latter that I made a number of illustrations to accompany particular stories or to fill in empty space. These were all drawn by hand in pen and india ink; there were no scanners or illustrating programs in those days.

I found this one in a portfolio of other archaeological illustrations, section drawings, lithics, site plans, etc. When excavating, all the deposit must be put through sieves, usually nested, to separate all the artefactual or cultural material from the soil for bagging and later analysis. We did an awful lot of dry and wet sieving in those days. A day on the sieves could be truly tedious if you weren't finding much.

This is the idea behind this picture, done in 1992.  This was long before I had any inkling that I would end up as a space archaeologist, so I think it's a bit prophetic. (And thank god I spelt "sieve" right in it!).

The art of the cable tie

OK, I've already admitted I'm obsessed. But I really can't resist sharing these wonderfully creative uses of the cable tie. A few weeks ago, I bought a book on the basis that it had instructions on how to make one of those cafe-style fly curtains out of cable ties (I'm not actually going to do it, I just like the idea).  Here is what some other people have done with them.

Mia Mulvey, an artist based in Denver, Colorado, has made ceramic sculptures incorporating cable ties. She says she is influenced by "the intersection between art and science, its history, advancements and tools".  In the work you see below, she has tethered flying things like birds and butterflies to a tree with cable ties.

Heather Skowood is a contemporary jeweller and designer. Here are a couple of things she has made with cable ties.  You can read her blog to find out more about her philosophy.

Finally, even the cable tie itself can be designed so that it is both beautiful and functional (WHY can't they make watches and diaries like that. They are always one or the other but never both). My friend the Mess Goddess has sourced these gorgeous Italian cable ties with a leaf on the end. She loves cable ties as much as I do, but for different reasons.

I'm sure there are many more examples of exceptional cable tie creativity out there. Let me know if you find any.

Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen at ACMI. Review by guest blogger Dan North

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s exhibition Star Voyager: Exploring Space On Screen is a celebration of the historical and future relationship of space exploration and the moving image. Compiling a vast collection of film and archives from the late 1800s until present day, the otherworldly exhibition tells the tale of art informing science and in turn, science informing art.

Descending the stairs into darkness, one arrives amid the moving pictures and parlour tricks of the early 20^th century. It is a world of fantasy and magic where voyagers to Georges Méliès' moon bring their top hats and umbrellas to be shot from a canon into space. Mars is host to an array of space operas, involving benevolent giants, and is home to the elaborate constructivist metropolis of the mysterious and beautiful Queen Aelita. 

Alongside these fantastic voyages and tricks of the eye are the writings of rocket pioneers Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, documenting the early beginnings of real space travel.

With the first occurrence of a countdown to zero before launch, the startlingly accurate 1929 film Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang is considered the first serious portrayal of space exploration. Lang employed rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth as technical advisor to provide an authentic as possible illustration of multi-stage rocket travel. A scene depicting the crew staring back at earth evokes a similar reaction the Apollo 8 astronauts would have had almost 40 years later as they saw their first earthrise. Despite scientific inaccuracies (such as the moon having a perfectly breathable atmosphere) the film was considered so accurate that the Nazi government confiscated Lang’s research and model rockets. A young Wernher von Braun was to be so inspired by Frau im Mond that he painted the film’s logo on early V-2s.

Moving on through other films and artifacts, a Russian film from the 1950s depicts what life on a soviet space station would be like. It’s a strange mash-up of antiquated phone exchange and a submarine - however space is not without it’s creature comforts -  everyone has an apartment with a view of the earth. Even your pet-comrade cat sits oddly purring at the window as the stars drift past. The film is presented as a sober documentary - this was to be the future for the USSR. This fictional Russian space station with its rotating wheel design was to be influential on Stanley Kubrick when thinking of his space hotel seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The exhibition design by Minifie van Schaik Architects makes strong reference to the visual vocabulary of real spacecraft. In orbit around walls of gold mylar you’ll find satellite-like pods displaying rare footage of cosmonauts and astronauts, John F Kennedy’s ‘We choose to the go the moon!’ speech at Rice University, unedited footage of Neil Armstrong climbing tentatively down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module (you’ve likely seen it a thousand times before, but unedited and without soundtrack or sentimental narrative, the raw video of that boot planting on the lunar soil is still quite awe-inspiring). There’s newsreel footage of astronaut poster-boy John Glenn and various depictions of the space race in film - Apollo 13, The Right Stuff and Space Cowboys. 

The space race was also the era of the vinyl record. Curators Emma McRae and Sarah Tutton appear to have collected every space related album cover imaginable from Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet to the soundtrack of Plan Nine From Outer Space.

Unique to the exhibition is the short film On Mars 3D. It is too short. You want to see more. The Martian valleys and mountains look incredible and a little unbelievable. Is this really what the surface of Mars looks like? It makes Tatooine look boring. Planetary astronomy was never so cool.

Down a corridor reminiscent of the Discovery set from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (there’s a suspended model of the Discovery in there) you’ll find costumes, props and models from Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Total Recall and Moon amongst others. Contrasting with their real-life, used-in-actual-space counterparts, you get a sense of how science has influenced film and vice versa. It’s definitely a reciprocal relationship.

Amongst all the relatively familiar imagery, one exhibit is particularly fascinating for it’s unusual visceral qualities; presenting the smell and the sound of our own star, the sun. Eerie and absolutely alien, artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines have simulated what we could never possibly experience- a solar scratch and sniff.

The overall effect is a montage of original artifacts, props, film, and photographs- an artistic and scientific orgy of everything that is great about imagining or actually going into outer space. Highly recommended.

Star Voyager is on at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne, until January 29.

Dan North is a Sydney-based architect. He is also an amateur astronomer with a life long interest in the history of space exploration and set and prop design for science fiction films.

Communicating the archaeology of the contemporary past: an experiment in methodology

Recently, I took some graduate students out to one of my favourite places, the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Namadgi National Park, Australian Capital Territory. We did some normal archaeological things (pedestrian transect survey, mapping with DGPS, RTK-DPGS and baseline-offset), but I also wanted to do something different, to see if methodologies touted as being distinctive to the contemporary past had anything to offer us as archaeologists.

This is what I asked the students to do:

All that remains of a once vibrant facility, where over 100 people worked in shifts around the clock, is now concrete footings: the spikes and sky-gazing arcs of numerous antennas are represented by flat surfaces over which a person can walk without really registering what they are - as we observed with numerous Outward Bound hikers, who filed over the main antenna footing as if it were only a changing texture underfoot.  They seem to barely notice the interpretive signs. There are two generations of interpretive signs at Orroral; most people agree that the older ones are not very effective, but the more recent ones, which are far more informative, are only present at a few places near the most accessible parts of the site.  There's a lot of scope to do more, and this was also something I wanted the students to think about too.

So what happened?  Was this experiment worth it?  Most definitely, but not necessarily in the ways I was expecting.  And I wasn't really sure what I was expecting!

A few students took a little while to feel comfortable with the fact that it was THEIR instincts that were important here, and what appeared to be stupid to them was really exactly what I was looking for. Some were initially cautious, but no-one refused to do it or made too much of a fuss about it, despite the fact that it wasn't being assessed.

The first result was that approaching the site in this way caused the students to be very observant, paying attention to the meaning of ephemeral traces and relationships between structures.  They saw things that I had never paid any particular attention to, even though I was far more familiar with the site than they. Helen wrote an evocative piece about the fading white paint outlining parking places outside buildings such as the Minitrack Operations Building, a presence implying the absence of cars and workers. She noted that while these lines were "Ephemera appearing on no plan or map or survey, they have yet outlasted the buildings and hardware and people". Tom used photographs, from the interpretation panels, of the tracking station in operation and located the same perspectives now, juxtaposing the vibrancy of the peopled landscape with the silence of the concrete footings, and the decades of tree growth since the original photographs were taken. Steve put the people back in: on the flat floors without walls, he posed his fellow students carrying out activities that would once have happened in that building:  serving food in the canteen, sitting on a toilet, processing data in the operations building while looking at the view out to the 26 m antenna, sweeping the concrete curtain around the dish's base.

Cultural significance is not just about historic events and people; it's also about the senses, or what the Burra Charter (1999) defines as aesthetic significance (NOT to be confused with aesthetics).  Some students chose to engage senses other than sight, using both the real and imagined sounds of the site to evoke Orroral as it was in the past and in the present. Joan put a schematic engineering drawing of the 26 m antenna together with a broadcast from space: the voices of the astronauts communicating with ground control as the dish provided comms for a space shuttle mission, thus giving life and rapid movement to this monolithic structure. Jon showed a picture of the almost desolate, windswept northern end of the site, the valley enclosed by a bowl of alpine ranges that isolate it from radio interference, and played a recording of the wind and solitary bird calls: the loneliness of the abandoned tracking station that once spoke to the stars.

Poetry featured too. Lance asked us to close our eyes while he recited his words, removing us from the large common room and into his private vision; Susan used a whiteboard to draw the features of the site as she wove the outline of a yet-to-be-written poem together from fragments of the past and the present, a work in progress.

Susan, Liam and the poem taking shape on the whiteboard

John, our intrepid technical officer, emerged in his fluoro vest, set up the dumpy level tripod, tipped a bag of rubbish on to the floor, and lay down with his hat over his face: the postprandial nap amidst the wreckage of lunch. The rubbish had been collected from the site: he had very carefully picked up drink and food containers on which the use-by date was after 2011, reasoning that they were actually rubbish and not artefacts as they half-existed in the future. In this careful act he has captured all the paradoxes of the archaeology of the contemporary past, and I think he was a little taken aback when I insisted that we keep his collection for analysis .......

John naps amidst the artefacts of the future

Another principle of contemporary archaeology is 'making the familiar unfamiliar'. When you're looking at recent material culture, we are so used to it that we don't necessarily perceive its role in our lives. But, as Colleen Beck has pointed out, much of the technology of the recent past is anything but familiar. We all know of nuclear testing and the terrible deployments of these weapons, but could any of us identify the components of a test site and figure out what went on there? We all use satellite technology, but could we identify Orroral Valley as a tracking station by the layout and antenna footings alone? These kinds of places, which define the global technologies of the recent past, are frequently inaccessible and mysterious. They need interpreting; they're places that help us make sense of the world we live in.

Jonathan showed a photo of the 9 m antenna footing: much more intimate in scale than the big dish. He talked about popular quizzes where people have to guess what an object is. Asking us to place ourselves in the role of a 'lay' listener/viewer, he asked 'What is it?'.  Indeed. What, actually, is this circle of concrete with a sloped half-amphitheatrical wall behind it? How do we describe this structure?

The students connected a place, trace or structure with imagined human actions - and hence stories - creating new avenues for approaching the interpretation of the site and making it real. But the most stunning outcome was when the students presented their pieces before the small audience of ourselves and four visitors, Johnn, Geoff, Adam and Liam, who had joined us for dinner that night. I wasn't sure if our guests would want to stay for this part of the evening, but they were riveted. Afterwards, Johnn said 'You should do this for the ABC'. He made an interesting argument: because there were nine small snapshots of the site, all highlighting completely different things in different ways, there was something to appeal to the most diverse of audiences. If one approach didn't do it for you, then one of the others was bound to. So in terms of communicating with non-archaeologists, he saw this as a way of engaging the public effectively. The very personal choices the students made about what appealed to them, what caught their attention and how they expressed it, mirrored the diversity of the broader community, creating points of entree into what otherwise might be opaque technology. I was very struck by this insight, that reaffirmed a position outlined in Harrison and Schofield's recent textbook on the archaeology of the contemporary past: that we are the best authorities on the archaeology of us; that the process of autoanthropology or autoethnography is revealing of our own approaches to the material world.

And of course the question you're all asking - was there an interpretive dance?  Yes there was, but Chantal was too shy to perform it!