Space
is cool. We are on the dawn of a Second Space Age with a host of new
commercial applications becoming available. Space Tourism is a viable
business, rocketry is receiving new attention and new satellite
services are changing everyone's lives. New events and prizes have
brought this multifaceted endeavor further into the public view. Now
you can be part of the action.
Postcards To Space offers you an
opportunity to engage with outer space in new ways. Something you help
create will travel above the sky and be visible worldwide. Postcards To
Space offers a new form of public art, the user-funded space sculpture.
The same technology involved can build solar sails, giant telescopes,
wake-shields and solar-thermal rockets, while carrying your Postcards
to incredible new locations.
Outer space offers an unlimited
future for humanity and all life. We will harvest the Solar System and
build cities of glass, water and dreams. Some day we will make dead
worlds Grow.
Creative expression on a frontier is
essential to understanding the new ways of doing. Space Art is the
first new field of arn and technology. Further sculptures in the series
will increase in scale and capability. Inflated with a breath's worth
of gas, these rings will present the natural wholeness of a circle
while recombining into overall digital life.
Postcards To Space and the Project:
San Bao series of spacecraft turn "public art" inside out. Funded by
individual citizens and displaying each person's art, your decorated
Postcards, the spacecraft becomes both individual and public work. This
ground-up creative act is then flown above the sky for worldwide
viewing. In the past, what has counted as public art was funded by
patrons and states, as exemplified by the Medici of Renaissance Italy.
Traditionally, satellites have been the domain of nation-states and
large corporations. During recent years universities, individuals and
small business are gaining access to space-based services and actual
satellite hardware, examples include the failed Cosmos I solar sail and
recent CubeSat flights (and failures, it's still Rocket Science).
Conceptually, "space art" has been around since Tsoilkovsky,
Constructivism and Sputnik. Perhaps it has been around since the
invention of fireworks. Postcards To Space offers an achievable path
toward art that actually goes into space. This differs in the extreme
from previous, unsustainable, proposals to generate flying space art.
The open nature of the overall sculpture adds new dimensions to what
constitutes "public art" while being entirely privately funded,
essentially via micropayment.
The Project: San Bao series
spacecraft represent the fusion of lateral creativity and high
technology. The vast reflective STREET ring strives for perfection in
form, elegance, symmetry. Throughout history the circle has symbolized
unity. The strategic ring represents oneness, a new messenger in the
sky, the wholeness of the world. The sweep of orbital mechanics
combines with ancient symbolism to present a message of awakening in
this dawn of the 21st Century.
These craft present monumental yet
ephemeral sculpture. The ring will be visible overhead when in
sunlight. Travelling at orbital speeds, several hundred miles overhead,
the sculpture takes on the fleeting glimmer of something imagined.
Streaking through space it reminds every observer of the fragility of
our small blue home.
Respectfully,
Joshua Gigantino
