Tag Archives: Mars

Menu for Mars: Test-drive cooking on the Red Planet

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It started with a polite invitation (“Join the Menu for Mars Supper Club as we pioneer a menu for the Red Planet”) and a series of tomato-red doors leading into plastic-walled chambers. Pierogi’s project space The Boiler has been transformed into a scientific kitchen until June 21st, during which time visitors and artists will test recipes for life on Mars as an extension of organizers Heidi Neilson and Douglas Paulson’s year-long Menu for Mars Supper Club.

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Joshua Liebowitz’s Untag: Prototype for Nutritional Privacy in Barcode-Ready Agar and LEDs

This Flux Factory educational initiative brings together artists, scientists, musicians, and the public to imagine food on Mars. I visited at the opening of Menu for Mars, where spaces encased in plastic featured a central kitchen surrounded by a greenhouse, a food gallery, a photo booth, and an office. The greenhouse displays Marco Castro’s ideas for an inflatable garden and greenhouse with plants that could survive the long journey and harsh climate. Tattfoo Tan has created NEMREs (“New Earth Meal Ready to Eat”) that are not traditionally appetizing—these dehydrated food packs are apparently made from rescued food waste.

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Tattfoo Tan’s Beet Treet

Social engagement brings this interesting theoretical proposition to life, as the space becomes an invitation to action. An ongoing series of programming involving groups as diverse as The Planetary Society of New York City, yogurt-maker Gil Lopez, and musician Will Owens offers guided ways to interact with the space. Anytime, however, visitors can take advantage of a pantry stocked with Mars-feasible ingredients in a variety of dried, powdered, thermostabilized, and dehydrated forms. Meals, including—I believe—those of visitors, will be documented, sample, sealed, and sent as prototypes to NASA to help with their plans to colonize Mars.

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Cooking ingredients in the kitchen

Tomorrow, June 13, at 3 pm, there is a “Jiminy Mac and Cheese” workshop, for those of you adventurous enough to imagine crickets in your Mars macaroni.

It’s a bold, new world.

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One of Heidi Neilson’s five portholes with views onto Mars entitled Big Sky Out There

 

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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