A Website event - Beam Me Up - showcases new online art projects by artists Jamie O'Shea and Joe Winter and a previously unpublished poem by artist Alec Finlay as well as new essays by scientists Guillaume Belanger and Jayanne English, all of which reflect on the nature of perceiving and representing space and outer space.

Beam Me Up is a global project by Xcult.org, based in Basel, which will continue into 2010 inviting art contributions and essays which seek to interpret concepts of space and cyberspace using both pictures and texts, artistic and philosophical models as well as scientific experience. These new works have been commissioned by UK-based curator Sarah Cook. Xcult.org have been organizing and curating Internet-based art and text projects which deal with questions of our understanding of reality and our use of the media since 1995.

Jamie O'Shea has been building small shrines to the transmissions of the robotic probes on the surface of Mars. The latest telematic shrine, an icy tomb in O'Shea's freezer created with a timed humidifier and toaster, is a simulation of a probe we have lost contact with -- NASA's Phoenix lander. For the duration of the summer here on Earth you can watch O'Shea's web-cam, delayed by the time lag between Earth and Mars, and see the latest shrine to the 'martyred lander' become slowly encased in ice crystals -- just as the actual probe is entombed in dry ice on Mars right now. Phoenix may come back online when it thaws sometime in October 2009 (during the Martian spring), and if it does and begins retransmitting signals to Earth, it will turn on the toaster probe in O'Shea's freezer, melting it free.
link: http://www.beam-me.net/beitragdetail.php?lang=e&artid=51

Joe Winter's work challenges how we understand the space of the computer screen and filmic space-time. By shooting videos out in the world, and then playing those back onto the bed of a scanner, Joe reminds us that technology, no matter how much it is upgraded, will never be able to truly capture how we see the world. His online 'animations' are at once both films and drawings, of a space which seems familiar from lived experience, but has been flattened into little more than traces of once live, now archived, digital data.
link: http://www.beam-me.net/beitragdetail.php?lang=e&artid=46

Alec Finlay's untitled and previously unpublished poem was composed in 2008 after a conversation he had with the sound artist Honor Harger whose practice involves listening to radio signals from outerspace. Alec's work encompasses poetry, visual art and publishing; he recently released the One Hundred Year Star-Diary, a collaboration with Denis Moskowitz & Professor Ray Sharples, which has a page per year, beginning in 2008, charting the night sky, with old and new astronomical symbols for the constellations, and leaving room for your thoughts and observations.
link: http://www.beam-me.net/beitragdetail.php?lang=e&artid=45

Alongside these art commissions are two pieces of writing commissioned from astrophysicists working internationally, all of which seek to reconcile the impossibilities inherent in attempts to represent our understanding of outer space.

Dr. Guillaume Belanger of the Gamma-ray mission Integral of the European Space Agency has written a new essay that raises questions regarding our perception of this world, of what we know, and ultimately of ourselves. He draws his inspiration for the context in which he sets these simple but fundamental questions from our home Galaxy: its stars, its structure, and its nucleus, the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
link: http://www.beam-me.net/beitragdetail.php?lang=e&artid=42

Dr. Jayanne English of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Physics and Astronomy has submitted a new animation showing the cold hydrogen gas, which is invisible to human eyes, in our Milky Way Galaxy. Dr. English makes images from complex data sets acquired via telescopic observations of outer space, determining the colour and form of them as she sits in front of her computer screen. A full essay on the interface of space-time and the human imagination as seen through a monitor will follow at the end of the summer.
link: http://www.beam-me.net/beitragdetail.php?lang=e&artid=43

About the project Beam Me Up

Since its launch in Autumn of 2008, Beam Me Up has collected together in an online database over fifteen newly commissioned works and articles on the subject of outer space, the space of the online world and globalization by artists including Tan Gengxiong, Jieming Hu, Zhenhua Li, Samuel Herzog, Alan Sondheim, Carlo Zanni, and Esther Hunziker. The project is organised by Xcult.org, an artist group based in Basel, Switzerland, who extended the invitation to curators (currently including in addition to Sarah Cook, Stefan Riekeles from Les Jardins des Pilotes, Berlin; Zhang Lansheng from Shanghai and Annette Schindler from Basel) to each select artists and writers for their own contributions. The variety of material gathered will later be organized subjectively into Guided Tours by a number of other invited guests and the audience too, will have the possibility to comment and to propose field research contributions of their own.


Direction, curatorial work and basic concept: Reinhard Storz, Xcult.org
Conceptual co-operation: Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg
Interface and database programming, technical support: Klaus Affolter
The Beam Me Up project is supported by
Sitemapping.ch media projects
Digital Art collection
Stiftung Basel
Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt
Prohelvetia (Swiss Arts Council)
Xcult.org