Marcel-li Antunèz Roca – Transpermia – Dédalo Project – 2003

My performances and installations over the last decade have been based mostly on scientific and technological issues, such as body interfaces, computational systems and new representational instruments. My research to date on these subjects has lead to the creation of the Dresskeletons (exoskeletal body interfaces), the design and construction of robotic prototypes such as the Fleshbot, in Joan L’home de carn (a robot made up of mechanisms and flesh) or the bodybots (body-controlled exoskeletical robots) Epizoo and Réquiem, and to the development of software models for editing and controlling interactive robots, images and sound in real time. All of which lead to my definition of an interactive narrative system, Sistematurgia, which I used in my mechanotronic performances Epizoo, Afasia and Pol. However, and in spite of the complex technology involved in my Sistematurgies, the ideas they develop intend, not without irony, to be deeply human. In my works I explore subjects such as the vulnerability of the body, orgiastic impulses or chimeric identities.

I have been working on Proyecto Dédalo since the beginning of 2003. This project consists in performing, filming and post producing micro-performances in zero gravity. This level of gravity was reached in the parabolic flights we made last April in the Russian Star Ciy in an Ilyushin, an aircraft prepared for this purpose by the GCTC-Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. A specific number of parabolas are effected during each parabolic flight: in our case, six in the first flight and nineteen in the second, that is, twenty-five parabolas in all. A parabola is achieved by the plane ascending at 45º from a flight altitude of approximately six thousand meters to about eight thousand meters, then dropping, at the same angle, to the initial altitude. The manoeuvre submits the occupants of the plane to an atmosphere of double gravity during half a minute, then a period of about twenty-five seconds in zero gravity, or microgravity, returning to another half minute in double gravity.

The Dedalo micro-performances were carried out during the brief periods in microgravity, and were organized in two blocks. In six of the parabolas the bodybot Réquiem, a simulator of body gestures, was used, and in the remaining nineteen the Dresskeleton’s features enabled interacting with a visual projection and a softbot, both specifically created for this purpose.

Réquiem was initially designed and produced in 1999 as an interactive installation for my exhibition Epifanía. Réquiem represents a mechanical sarcophagus capable of moving (metaphorically, give life to) my corpse, thus its name. But Réquiem is also a gestual simulator, a robotic suit capable of carrying out sophisticated choreographies. In its installation format Requiem is hung from a metal support, without my body inside, and performs sequences of movements activated by the spectators by means of touch display sensors set up in the room. For the airborne performances, Réquiem was hung by straps from the inside structure of the Ilyushin. When the parabola reached zero gravity, a technician activated a sequence and Réquiem, with me inside it, floated in a certain way. As in the installation, the movement of the pneumatic valves was previously programmed in a PLC computer, which ran short movement sequences adapted to the duration of the parabolas. One of Requiem’s enactments would make it possible to remember, during long periods in microgravity, how we move in earth gravity. In another, Réquiem becomes a paradox of control: in surroundings where the body can float gracefully, the machine grips, controls and hinders whoever wears it. After observing the result of the parabolas during which I wore Réquiem, and taking into account the behaviour of the instructors – who wouldn’t allow the machine to float about freely – this idea seems the most obvious one.

The remaining micro-performances involved the buoyancy of the body, the possibilities of the body interface Dresskeleton, and the behaviour of a device we call softbot. This soft robot consists in a rectangular aluminium body containing electrovalves, connected to four flexible plastic tube arms for compressed air, and ending in a horn and three balloons that can be blown up. The softbot is cable-connected to a mechanotronic system and controlled by modem radio from the Dresskeleton. The switches ringed to my index and middle fingers open and close the air flow to the balloons, blowing them up, and to the horn, sounding it. The softbot, just a bunch of cables, takes on its wider and dynamic shape in microgravity, like seaweed does in the sea.

But in addition to the softbot, I used the dresskeleton to interact simultaneously on films. Three interactive films were prepared with different graphic contents based on three subjects: microbiology, transgenics and bio-robots. Here, interaction did not involve deliberate control, as in the case of the softbot. Our lack of experience in micro gravity made us consider the possibility of arbitrary movement and, therefore, of involuntary interaction. The oscillation of the range sensors produced by the movements of elbows, shoulder blades and knees activated the films via those same parts on the dresskeleton. During the first flight I carried out this set of micro-performances simply floating in front of the screen with the occasional help of the technical team accompanying me on the flight.

But very early on we realized that the absence of weight, and therefore of anchorage to the ground, caused variations in the synchronicity between body movements and locomotion. The extremities floated around without affecting displacements of the body. In this new dimension, the body floated freely; the body-movement vectors multiply. Metaphorically using programming language, the body’s extremities act as an application, with its own variables, contained within another application, the floating body, that obeys its independent parameters.

As well as the feeling of strangeness caused by this new way of moving, a loss of selfception occurred. Selfception is our sense of movement, responsible for informing us how and when we move. When there is movement, this is the sense in charge of informing the brain of its variations. When selfception is absent, the experience of movement is blocked, and is only partly completed when you view what happened in the videographic representation.

After experiencing the first flight and viewing its result on video, we decided to change strategy and to request the help of Boris, one of the GCTC instructors. The control Boris had over my floating body in the second flight produced an extraordinary choreography, during which I interacted with the softbot and with the films through my extremities. During this flight the experience acquired new dimensions. Microgravity was now more familiar to us, thanks to which the result was in general more precise.

As I mentioned before, the overall experience of each micro-performance required the viewing of its videographic recording to be complete. In this sense, reality and representation complement each other to make up the final experience. Without viewing the videographic representation, the experience is incomplete. From this point of view, the films projected onto the screen ended up by acquiring an unexpected dimension. The sum of the virtual images of the films and my body choreography transmuted on video into a single reality. Like the back projections in road scenes in 1950 movies, the virtual projection plus the real action make up a new reality, one represented by the videographic recording. And if this representation is the part that completes the final experience of microgravity, then virtuality is likewise part of the same.

After this experience I realized that the conquest of space is one of the most extensive and most complex challenges of our time. The exosphere is agravic, anaerobic and radioactive, that is, extremophilous for man. And to inhabit it, an entirely new world must be redesigned. My guess is that, in this new orb, a myriad of new scenarios will converge; not only will the military and scientific communities have a say in the matter – organic life, human relations, all kinds of new activities… and artists, will all be fundamental. But art will reflect a world that will draw together the antagonist concepts of biological evolution and cultural evolution, the union of what is natural and what is artificial.

We know that life exists on our planet, that it has done so for at least three thousand five hundred million years. One theory on the origin of life propounds that the earth was sewn with spores that arrived, carried by comets, from another part of the universe. This theory receives the name of Panspermia. Those simple organisms, probably bacteria, evolved until producing the endless number of organisms we know today. You could said that the strategy of life has taken three thousand five hundred million years to produce a sort of complex organism known as homo sapiens. Primates capable of using a form of intelligence that enables, among other things, the development of science and technology.

Inverse Panspermia, or Transpermia as I call it, is the hypothesis leading to Utopia. Surely we all, artists included, dream of a new universe, a land waiting to be ploughed, where everything is possible. A dream that contemplates the making of new cosmogonies, of extraordinary mythologies, of unsuspected ceremonies.

Proyecto Dedalo was the conceptual generator of Transpermia. And maybe it is here where my investigations come most coherently together. I have a feeling that this new and fertile field will be the origin of many new prototypes.