An Irish designer is developing a interactive sculpture that will float around inside the international space station, writes John Moore
Within the next two years astronauts in orbit on board the International Space Station (ISS) could be interacting with a high-tech sculpture designed by a company in Ireland.
Entitled the "symbiotic sphere" and a bit bigger than a grapefruit, the artwork is the brainchild of interdisciplinary artist Anna Hill, whose aim is to bring to a mass audience on earth what it feels and looks like to live in space.
"Except for astronauts and cosmonauts, the actual feelings and experiences of living in space have remained unreachable to most of us," says Hill. "The sphere will be able to record and distribute their experiences to us on earth, and by so doing shift our consciousness and mindsets on how we view ourselves."
Designed as a free-floating sculpture for zero gravity, the sphere has several, small, disc-shaped portals equally spaced around its surface. Each portal has a different piece of interactive hardware, like a camera, a microphone or speaker, which the astronauts will use to communicate to users on earth.
The astronauts can even connect up with the sphere, using electrodes and other sensory devices attached to their bodies, which will record their biorhythms and the emotional responses they feel while in space.
"All the data, together with live images of planet earth and outer space, is sent down to specially designed audio-visual units on earth, called synapses," explains Hill. "The synapses will be placed globally around the earth with different cultural interfaces, allowing the user have their own personal experience of what it's like to be in space."
Hill (37), initially conceived of the idea of the synapse system while working on conceptual sculptures involving the relationship between mind and matter.
"I wanted to apply this relationship to science and technology from a more organic and humanistic approach, and saw that the unique experience of living in space could create in us an emotional connection with the earth's environment and the way we evolve globally," she says.
The European Space Agency (ESA) heard of Hill's project and immediately gave her a study contract, with the enticing prospect that it might be included on board the Columbus space laboratory (the European part of the ISS) - due for launch in 2007 or 2008.
That's when Hill turned entrepreneur. Through collaboration with a space weather services company, Imagine Technologies, based in University College Dublin, and a software company, ESP Technologies, based in Shannon, she set up her own company, Space Synapse Ltd, in Dublin's digital hub.
Enterprise Ireland, which also saw the potential in Hill's project, got on board, and it has just given her approval for a commercialisation feasibility study through its Irish Space units. With this in her pocket, Hill left for ESA's headquarters in Holland, this week, to bid for another contract to develop a prototype of the sphere.
One would think from all these entrepreneurial and techno-babble experiences that Hill has lost sight of her artistic roots.
"Not so," she says. "I'll also be incorporating into the sphere's design an artistic and aesthetic relationship between early astronomy instruments and scientific inquiry."
Hill therefore intends to make the sphere from etched metals, in reference to the old metal instruments of navigation and astronomy, such as astrolabes and telescopes. A watch keeping Venus time (where an earth-day lasts nearly half a year) will also be included to signify the different time zones planets keep, and precious gemstones taken from the five continents of the earth will be dotted around the sphere's surface.
"I'll also have a piece of fossilised stromatolite, the earliest form of life on earth, included in one of the portals, to embody the ever-changing perceptions we have of life on earth and in this universe we inhabit," says Hill.
For more information, see Anna Hill's website: http://www.spacesynapse.com