Star Voyager - Exploring Space on Screen
If there is one thing we love here at Web
Wombat Education, it's the endless stream of excellence that spews
forth from the doors of ACMI. Their latest exhibition does nothing to
change our opinion.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) will present the
world premiere of Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen, a major
exhibition charting the history and future of space exploration as
experienced through the moving image, opening 22 September, 2011.
Filmmakers’ and artists’ imaginings of space travel, from Georges
Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), the first footage of a human on the
moon in 1969, and recent films such as Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009) and
James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), have allowed us to experience through
the moving image what most of us can only dream of.
Star Voyager celebrates this imagination and exploration through over
100 years of the moving image.
Combining scientific and documentary footage together with feature
films and video artworks, the exhibition blurs the distinction between
fact and fiction to examine how the creative imagination and a desire
for discovery have inspired artists, filmmakers and scientists through
generations.
Inspiration shared between these disciplines has encouraged new visions
and technologies which allow us to continually venture into the unknown
in the attempt to understand more about our universe and about humanity
itself.
Star Voyager includes rare feature film and documentary footage, video
artworks, television clips, animations, as well as film ephemera such
as models, costumes and production materials, to reveal the
relationship between the moving image and space – fact and fiction.
The exhibition features a space-flown camera aboard NASA’s Apollo 12
mission and other space-flown objects, costumes and models from 2001:A
Space Odyssey (1968), Sunshine (2007) and Star Trek (1979), as well
references of space in popular culture such as music video clips.
Visitors to Star Voyager will see the world premiere of an exciting new
work, developed here in Melbourne by the Centre for Astrophysics
& Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. The
(currently untitled) work, created with data gathered by Mars Rovers
‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’, allows visitors to explore the surface of
Mars in 3D.
Melbourne-based artist Peter Hennessey has been commissioned to create
a new space-themed interactive installation.
In addition, Hennessey’s My Lunar Rover (2005) and My Voyager (2004),
an actual-size model of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, will be on show.
Thirty-four years after the Voyager mission was launched it remains the
vehicle for humanity’s furthest exploration of the Universe.
ACMI Director Tony Sweeney says that the human experience and knowledge
of space travel has been profoundly affected by the moving image. "Yuri
Gagarin’s mission launched on April 12th 1961 marked an extraordinary
transition in one of mankind’s oldest aspirations – to be able not just
to look into space and imagine what was there, but actually to voyage
there and experience it directly".
"From the first images of a human journeying into space in 1961, to the
groundbreaking television broadcast of the first steps on the moon by
Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969, recorded footage of human space
exploration quickly became as significant as the missions themselves.
Images beamed around the world since the 1960s have captured the public
imagination and inspired artists, scientists and travellers in
unforeseeable ways" Sweeney concluded.
ACMI celebrates humankind’s enduring fascination with space in the year
that marks the 50th anniversary of the first nmanned flight into space
by Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok spacecraft , as well as the 50th
anniversary of the completion of Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope in
New South Wales, which was used to transmit the television signals that
allowed 600 million people to watch the Apollo 11 moon walk live.
ACMI Curators Emma McRae and Sarah Tutton have worked closely with a
number of collaborators to realise this exhibition, including the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Centre for Astrophysics
& Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, and the
Stanley Kubrick Archive, among others.
A series of film programs, public talks, tours, workshops and education
programs for all ages will be developed to coincide with the exhibition.
Star Voyager:
Exploring Space on Screen will have its world premiere at
the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square,
Melbourne, on 22 September 2011 and will run until 29 January 2012. |
