[spectre] Richard Clar - New Mix EMF10 - Palais de Tokyo, December 17, 2004

[Richard Clar]

(Apologies for crossing posting)

*---------------------------------------
*

*Richard Clar – NewMix emf ^10 -^ Palais de Tokyo, Paris*

Artist Richard Clar’s 2003 orbital debris constellation sculpture video, 
COLLISION II, featuring the music of Marc Battier, will be shown on 
Friday evening December 17^th at 22h00 at the Palais de Tokyo as part of 
NewMix emf^10 . Included on Friday evening, will be a performance at 
20h05 of New Butoh Space Dance by Tetsuro Fukuhara. This two-evening 
event, the 17^th and 18^th of December, is a celebration of the 
Electronic Music Foundation’s 10^th anniversary. Full program details 
for NewMix emf^10 may be found at: http://mapage.noos.fr/maatfrance/

*COLLISION II: An Orbital Debris Constellation Sculpture*

Forty-six years and thousands of launches later, the near-Earth 
environment of space has become heavily populated with orbital debris. 
The heaviest concentration of orbital debris is in low-Earth orbit, 
becoming less dense as it progresses out to geosynchronous orbit. These 
orbital debris objects consist of spent rocket bodies, various space 
hardware, non-functioning satellites, and fragments from explosions. 
According to information provided by the Aerospace Corporation in 
California, there have been more than 124 verifiable breakups in space. 
Collisions and explosions are usually the cause of breakups, with 
explosions being the main source.

COLLISION II, a site-specific interdisciplinary work, focusing on the 
serious problem of orbital debris, results from a collaboration begun in 
June, 2003, between artist Richard Clar, the Naval Research Laboratory 
in Washington D.C., and French composer Marc Battier.

Using a massively paralleled computer and tracking data from the U.S. 
Space Command, the Naval Research Laboratory precisely predicts the 
orbits of more than 10,000 orbital debris objects that now comprise the 
orbital debris catalog.

To create COLLISION II, Richard Clar selected 192 orbital debris objects 
in low-Earth orbit from all of the space-faring nations in much the same 
fashion as he did in 1995, when he created the first COLLISION orbital 
debris space sculpture. The 192 designated orbital debris objects that 
now make up the orbiting constellation sculpture COLLISION II are 
located in a region of space defined by the following parameters: 
Between 96 and 104 degrees of inclination and an altitude of 450 to 800 km.

Marc Battier, French composer and Université de Paris-Sorbonne 
Professor, formerly head of musical and software documentation at IRCAM, 
composed the music for COLLISION II based in part on the orbital debris 
data provided by the Naval Research Laboratory.