(Apologies for crossing posting)
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Richard Clar - NewMix emf 10 - Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Artist Richard Clar’s 2003 orbital debris constellation sculpture video, COLLISION II, featuring the music of Marc Battier, will be shown on Friday evening December 17th at 22h00 at the Palais de Tokyo as part of NewMix emf10. Included on Friday evening, will be a performance at 20h05 of New Butoh Space Dance by Tetsuro Fukuhara. This two-evening event, the 17th and 18th of December, is a celebration of the Electronic Music Foundation’s 10th anniversary. Full program details for NewMix emf10 may be found at: http://mapage.noos.fr/maatfrance/
COLLISION II: An Orbital Debris Constellation Sculpture
Forty-six years and thousands of launches later, the near-Earth environment of space has become heavily populated with orbital debris. The heaviest concentration of orbital debris is in low-Earth orbit, becoming less dense as it progresses out to geosynchronous orbit. These orbital debris objects consist of spent rocket bodies, various space hardware, non-functioning satellites, and fragments from explosions. According to information provided by the Aerospace Corporation in California, there have been more than 124 verifiable breakups in space. Collisions and explosions are usually the cause of breakups, with explosions being the main source.
COLLISION II, a site-specific interdisciplinary work, focusing on the serious problem of orbital debris, results from a collaboration begun in June, 2003, between artist Richard Clar, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., and French composer Marc Battier.
Using a massively paralleled computer and tracking data from the U.S. Space Command, the Naval Research Laboratory precisely predicts the orbits of more than 10,000 orbital debris objects that now comprise the orbital debris catalog.
To create COLLISION II, Richard Clar selected 192 orbital debris objects in low-Earth orbit from all of the space-faring nations in much the same fashion as he did in 1995, when he created the first COLLISION orbital debris space sculpture. The 192 designated orbital debris objects that now make up the orbiting constellation sculpture COLLISION II are located in a region of space defined by the following parameters: Between 96 and 104 degrees of inclination and an altitude of 450 to 800 km.
Marc Battier, French composer and Universite de Paris-Sorbonne Professor, formerly head of musical and software documentation at IRCAM, composed the music for COLLISION II based in part on the orbital debris data provided by the Naval Research Laboratory.
