Moonfarming: an Illustrated Encyclopedia is an experiment in multidimensional storytelling, exploring nostalgia, data, and the common need for a place of fantasy. An ongoing project, it incorporates sculpture, photographs, and written text.
images: 3D moon rock model
3D printed moon rock
Intended as a set of compensatory gestures for dreams dashed and plans deferred, Moonfarming’s subject is the moon of NASA (and Gagarin). The texts are concise – micro fiction and short poems – on subjects ranging from lunar fauna to soccer on the moon. The objects are apologetic yet hopeful (if not helpful) – garish “printed” 3D plastic rocks to replace the moon rocks lost on earth or a carpet of the lunar surface so that you, too, might walk on the moon (were the carpet not off-bounds due to its fragility). The photographs function as a distancing mechanism – like new forms of punctuation or opaque connectors that branch at odd junctions – problematizing and opening the work to allow varied readings.
Key questions and issues include:
– Does humour have a place in the Academy?
-How does storytelling function within the contexts of research and empirical data?
– What constitutes a book? Can text on the walls of a room be a book? A chapter? What forms are best suited to such possible multiple readings?
– At what point does a spatialized “book” become a museum/a cabinet of curiosities? If you have multiple “chapters” in different rooms can the “book” be called a library?
– How to use modern technologies to address and revise the narratives of a previous technological age
– Statement: artists create problems, researchers, solutions. Discuss and fight amongst yourselves. How to keep things fluid?
– Are the Martians Russian? (in the context of the cold -war binary).
image from google moon of the Apollo 16 mission area
pattern grid derived from google moon
section of latch hooked rug of Apollo 16 mission area
Moonfarming: an Illustrated Encyclopedia is created by Georgina Lewis
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