 This is a sound installation that included a song we wrote about space exploration. We sing about the astro-chickens, real genetically altered creatures that are scheduled for manufacture sometime in the near future. The idea is that you will be able to fly out in space and stop off for food on Mars and get your chicken fry and Martian potato, before you move on to the next planet.
We are inspired by the mathematician Freeman Dyson who has written extensively on space exploration.
This an excerpt from an interview with him:
"We just discovered some real planets out there. Unbelievable active goings on in the universe. Thirty years it took us to find planets. Full of violent events...gravitational fields, diversity. Quasars. Nature is richer than ours. Future extrapolations. The next one hundred years will be a period of transition between the metal and silicon technology of today and the enzyme and nerve technology of tomorrow. Astro-chicken is a concrete example of what life might be like once it gets loose in the universe. Life ought to be loose in the universe. The universe is a dull place if we only have life in this planet. There?s all this enormous real estate out there which would be much more beautiful and more exciting if it came alive. Life would spread and that we are perhaps the mid-wives that would make this possible. What sort of life could live out there in a vacuum? (With a down-loaded consciousness.) Life here could survive. You would only need some radical changes on the surface. Our skins are not well-adapted to living in a vacuum. As far as the inside is concerned, it doesn?t make much difference. So you have to redesign the skin of a plant or animal in order for it to live in these conditions. Three things you have to deal with: Zero temperature, (if you are far from the sun,) zero gravity and zero pressure. Impermeable skin, don?t lose air and water, live on chemicals without exposing yourself to a vacuum. Life has diversity-body of a chicken, enormous wings which would act as a solar sail, uses solar radiation instead of air, appendages different. Extended membrane (sail) using sunlight to move. Radio antenna instead of sound. A viable species for colonizing outer space. But then you would need an ecology of living creatures and plants. Not just the chicken. Martian potato: its leaves are adapted to living in a vacuum. It?s underground, buried deep in soil. Microorganisms keep the ecology growing. Evolution would take over from there. We still need good system of space propulsion to get us off the ground. Artificial intelligence...these creatures could communicate through vast distances, but still have organic brains as well to do the other stuff, like eat, have sex, etc. a merging or parallel access of electronic brain and organic brain. A communicator between them."
Medium: cowboy hat, disco ball, sound mix, sound system
Date: 1997
Artist's rendering of astro-chickens
 Artist's rendering of martian potatoes
To learn more about Freeman Dyson: http://www.sns.ias.edu/~dyson/ |
