Montreal Space Symposium

I will discuss how I used the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada library as a forum for College level students to explore ideas for self directed research culminating in a work of art. I will give a brief summary of how contemporary artists are incorporating current space research into their artistic investigations. I will then provide examples of student projects from the 2018 John Abbott College Arts and Science Studio Art course that gave SPACE as the thematic to be explored through a visual means. Students used sound, video, drawing, painting and sculpture to create projects that were inspired by material located in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada library housed at John Abbott College in Montreal. The purpose of the project was to allow students to examine concepts of space in a very personal and creative manner. The presentation will provide examples of how very complex ideas around space can be experienced and relayed through visual means. I will provide a selection of 5 examples from the student projects using slide presentations in order to present a range of outcomes submitted for the course. Examples from my own studio practice will also be given to contextualize the project. This presentation will expose participants to how the arts and sciences are being bridged within the visual arts and how creativity, imagination, and exploration can be used to create independent works of art based on the vast and complex topic of space.

Artist, gallerist, and art-science researcher Bettina Forget will talk about her project Women With Impact, a series of drawings of Moon craters which are named after women, and her work as artist-in-residence at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory.

The project Women With Impact is a response to the underrepresentation of women in the historical record in the field of science. Out of the 1,605 named craters on the lunar surface, 29 are named after women – that is a meager 1.8%. To highlight this issue, Bettina Forget decided to research the locations of the lunar craters named after women using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. After capturing the most detailed images of the craters possible, she created a series of 29 drawings on paper.
A crater is essentially a void, a hollow in the regolith. The void echoes the underrepresentation of women in positions of power, in the scientific canon, and in history. The void also speaks to its opposite: each crater is a result of an impact, a shattering of the calm surface. The 29 women who made such an impact are thrown into full relief with each drawing.
The series Women With Impact fuses the aesthetics of drawing with a socio-political perspective and selenographic research to create a project which bridges art and science.

For her artist residency at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory, Exoplanet Zoo proposed to create a taxonomy of exoplanets in sculptural form with the use of 3D printing technology. To create the collection of exoplanet prints, data sets associated with exoplanets were integrated into the source code of a 3D model of a plain sphere, generating a variety of exoplanet “species.” The exoplanet’s data sets include information regarding the planet’s size, mass, inclination, distance from the host star, rotation period, atmospheric composition, etc. The 3D printed sculptures blur the boundaries between organic and inorganic forms, referencing seeds, cells, and diatoms as well as geometric, crystalline structures. As such, the artworks create a link to astrobiology and ponder the possibility of life in the universe. The menagerie of sculptures makes the variances and characters of exoplanet tangible, and explore a variety of classification options.

Our participation in the symposium intends to support its main topic and to complement other speakers contribution. We will take the audience in an endeavour to discover the new technologies of the commercial space industry, through our efforts in producing a documentary that will help us learn, explore, study and witness the industry's democratization and potential impact on humanity. The film presents a variety of points of view including voices for and critical of the commercial space industry, and shows the regulatory work that has been done and is currently being done (internationally) to make it a sustainable activity. It consist of a series of interviews with experts from the aerospace industry including lawyers, artists, environmentalists and astronauts, to listen their personal opinion and their expectations of technologies such as Space Transportation and Tourism (transportation of supplies, experiments, technology and satellites, human spaceflight, supersonic point-to-point travel and space hotels) Outer Space Mining (extraction of water and rare metals from asteroids, the Moon and Mars), and Permanent Human Settlements (on Mars, the Moon and Earth's orbits). Its objective is to create awareness and educate civil society, governments and the industry on the challenges, opportunities and risks of these technologies. We aim to reduce the unfamiliarity that surrounds the commercial space industry, and to promote a debate on a variety of areas such as legal, economic, environmental, social and scientific. We are at the dawn of disrupting technologies that could change the way we live in the same way aviation changed our world in one hundred years. This is a great opportunity to learn, explore, study and witness how Space Transportation and Tourism, Outer Space Mining and Permanent Human Settlements will democratize space, will make us an interplanetary species, will change our perception of ourselves and of Earth, and our relationship with our planet and other celestial bodies.