Alex Adriaansens – May the Force be with You – 2003

In daily life some of the forces of nature like gravity and the spinning of the earth are hardly noticed as they feel like our skin or the air that we breath. Without them we wouldn’t be what we are. These forces are perceived like a fish perceiving the water it swimms in – which is not perecieved at all on a conscious level – except during ‘accidents’ when things can become very clear all of a sudden. Gravity, as a major and still rather difficult to understand force of nature, is embedded on the deepest level of how we percieve and experience the world that we are part of.

Gravity is one of the forces that is ever present and that is determining the directions of all things that grow and move, and which shapes all immaterial and materials that are soft (often in conjunction with other forces of nature). And as all materials, according to the laws of thermodynamics, move from one stage of being into another (in between radiation, gas, fluids and hard material), and as everything we know in the universe is always on the move and in a stage of transition, we can understand the impact of gravity as one of the major forces in the universe and of life on planet earth in specific.

Gravity, a force that isn’t consciously experienced in normal situations, has been reflected upon in most cultures. This because we can’t escape the conditions that gravity creates: it keeps us humans to the ground. This is somehow painfull as we can see so much space above us and see objects move in that space, so the fascination for the invisible gravity force that keep us to the ground is somehow obvious. Gravity therefore vitalises our imagination and generates a strong desire to controll and overcome this force which translates itself in rituals, religious ceremonies, mythical stories, the arts and also the sciences.

This deeply inbedded desire, to free ourselves from the physical limitations caused by gravity is a strong and imaginative power, it is a strong drive and motive for developing and pushing western technological culture. It connects itself to social, political, economic and ecological issues.

We all know that our perception is misleading and that our senses and brain construct a limited understanding of reality. Art and science have been challenging our understanding of reality over and over through research and reflection. Over time we have understood better the dynamics and complexity of the social, cultural and scientific realities we live in, but still ‘the world’ as we percieve it, remains to be understood as an Interface as Otto Roesler explained in his presentation for MIR in Rotterdam; it remains a construct of our brains.

Our mistrust of reality, its mystifications and the wish to define a universal scientific understanding of reality it is a quest driven by socio political issues but also by the metaphysical questions about life. Falling (towards the centre of gravity), levitation and flying are used as strong metaphores and physical events, that are embedded in our social, cultural and scientific languages and rituals. They all refer to dynamic moments were instability and uncontrollability are important factors in challenging reality (but don’t forget that those who elevate or fly always fall down as Icarus showed us). Questioning and designing reality wether by science or art – or in conjunction with each other – has its price and its dangers as history shows.

It is these factors that created the grounds for the MIR – Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research project that is a collaboration between several European art organisations that focus on the relation between art and science, and art and technology.

The militairy complex of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow, the base for the Russian Space program, served as the facility for the MIR project and the artists that collaborated in it.
Dealing with gravity on a physiological level is best done in space travel, centrifuge devices, and parabolic flights which are part of the Russian, American and European Space programs. The parabolic flights simulate variable gravity conditions on a strong physical level for 30 seconds (after which one gets into double gravity for 20 seconds). Unfortunately these programs are hardly accessible for artists as they are mostly core scientific and military run programs. MIR created the opportunity for artists to do a series of research projects within the facilities of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow (parabolic flights, centrifuge). The MIR project offered the opportunity to a limited group of artists to realise artistic research projects based on the facilities of the center. In general these projects focussed on the aspects of the unstable behaviour of the body and bodily perception in general in conditions of variable gravity.

For V2_ a central issue to research within the MIR project was the effect of the visual and tactile perception in VR environments and the physiological effects it causes, a research that has until now mainly been conducted by scientists even though VR is a field of research for many artists. The relation between variable conditions of gravity and VR and their effect on our perception, mind and body language was a central theme for this. It focussed on our sense of embodiment within mediated spaces and mixed realities. The seminar that V2_ had arranged within the MIR project (http://lab.v2.nl/projects/mir.html; use the V2 website search engine) positioned this issue within the broader context of research in the field of variable gravity as mentioned in the previous paragraphs. The central question was how and what our body perceives in variable, dynamic and unstable conditions and how we can develop aesthetic principles that deal with immersive, interactive, dynamic and process based environments. See the text on Machine Aesthetics available at the V2 website and written by Andreas Broeckmann in 1997 at http://archive.v2.nl/ (use the V2 website search engine).

MIR expressed the recent wish of artists and scientists to get into dialogue, it shows the growing interest for interdisciplinary practices and its surplus for the specialistic practices wether science, social, economic or creative which inherently tend to be introvert. Reconnecting and repositioning the different specialistic domains in society is a social and cultural necessity, as the fruitility of any practice in society relates to how they are social and cultural embedded.