Tag Archives: space

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

 

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