Author Archives: Linnea

The Future Looks Different: Art Breaking the Space-Time Continuum

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WormholeConnection.HR-Stamenov

What can contemporary art do? We talked about modern art and design that traveled to space in spaceships (not to mention the whole discussion the historical avant-garde was having about creating the fourth dimension in their works at the time). Today in Sweden/Finland, artist HR-Stamenov created a wormhole: that is, he exploited the Einstein-Rosen bridge to take a shortcut through time and space as we experience it:

On March 12, a strange phenomenon will connect two cities located on the two opposite sides of the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea: Vaasa in Finland and Umeå in Sweden.

A transport corridor, provoked by the opening of a Wormhole, also known as an Einstein–Rosen bridge, which is a hypothetical topological feature of space-time, will create a ‘shortcut’ between the two cities. The phenomenon will allow a Train to appear inside a building in Vaasa, then 3 minutes later in Umeå, then back in Vaasa after 3 min. and after 3 min. again in Umeå…CONT HERE

Of course, HR-Stamenov is actually illustrating theories of time travels and space distortions by means of lights, that is, through  art rather than science.  But if Constructivist spaceships anticipated real ones, I wonder what this portal looks like. 

Soviet Socialist Republic of Mars

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As I suggested in my last post, Constructivism became the language of the future. Aelita, Queen of Mars was a 1924 silent film directed by Yakov Protazanov. It is often called the first Soviet science fiction film because of its futuristic sets on Mars (although most of it takes place in Moscow). Avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter‘s did the costume designs for the film immediately before she and her husband emigrated to Paris. Prior to that she exhibited with Constructivist artists and taught in Moscow.

The sharp angles and abstracted curves of Constructivism had become associated with science, technology, and human progress. Mars itself, portrayed on the left, looks like the architectonic forms that often appeared on avant-garde canvases at the time. In this elaborate setting of technological advancement, we watch the story of Aelita, Queen of Mars and other fantastically costumed denizens unfold.

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Interiors on Mars, above, costumes (note the maid’s pants!) below.

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The technical advancement of the Martians does not equal social advancement as we learn when the protagonist is finally propelled to Mars in a spaceship–all for the love of Queen Aelita. Mars then becomes not merely a site of escapist fantasy for the viewer, although it was certainly that, but a Utopian space of social change. Or perhaps a chance for the director to toe the part line. Either way, the visitors from earth discover oppressed workers on Mars and try to incite a revolution in order to create a Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics on Mars! I won’t spoil any more of it in case you want to watch it–its available for streaming with English subtitles and accompanying music here.

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The Future Looks Different: A Radical Break in Representations of Science

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Screenshot of the 1960 film The Time Machine

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Screenshot of 1902 film Le Voyage dans la lune

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Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin at Home, 1920, Collage

When H.G. Wells wanted to travel in time in his 1895 science fiction novella, The Time Machine, he rigged up a velvet chair with some ornate brass fixings and levers, and George Méliès sent the first explorers to the moon in his 1902 film, Le Voyage dans la Lune, by pulling the string of a (really) big canon. Think, then, of the radical break of the avant-garde from what we now call a “steampunk” aesthetic. Rather than relying on known objects in the world, avant-garde groups like the Russian Constructivists made an entirely new visual language, one that used geometric, abstract forms and principles of materialism to create a thoroughly modern language. And it can be begun with this man portrayed on the left with the large metal apparatus on his head.

Vladimir Tatlin led the way to this futurist Modern aesthetic of a “skeletal form, modesty of materials, antigravitational thrust, kineticism, and, most crucially, its creation of volume without recourse to mass” (Maria Gough, The Spatial Object). All of which can be seen in his model Monument to the Third International, below. This 1920 design for a grand monumental building by Tatlin was created in response to a call for proposals for monuments, and, more than a monument, it was also meant to be a functional building that housed the headquarters of the Comintern (the Third International). The judges shrugged off the design for a non-figurative monument, and indeed, the technology did not exist in 1920 to build this towering structure containing three internal levels that were meant to revolve at different speeds.

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Vladimir Tatlin, Model of Monument to the Third International, 1920

Meant to be an iconic modern structure, not unlike the Eiffel Tower, Tatlin’s model was hugely influential even if unrealized, notably on Alexander Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions. The Modernist elements–abstract geometries and undisguised use of materials and construction–became the forms of Constructivism, associated with the progress of science and society to a Utopian, Communist end. This 2006 abstract short film by Theodore Ushev is also inspired by Tatlin’s Tower and uses that same language.

Tower Bawher by Theodore Ushev, National Film Board of Canada