Humanity is crushing the world with junk, with debris. The cast away remnants of our excesses. We look to the skies as our saviour when we destroy our home, but we’ve already started the process of making space unreachable.
‘Space Junk’ – the remains of our trips to space encircles the Earth, a spinning death trap which could soon stop us entering the heavens. Literally millions of pieces debris from this space bound object grave yard.
The fascinating, Project Adrift helps us connect to this debris through art. Combining three elements Watch (there is a short documentary film), Listen and Adopt (you can follow standout pieces of debris live via social media) we can get a real sense of this junk lost in our orbit.
For us at Bloop, it is the ‘Listen’ aspect created by sound artist and composer Nick Ryan which is the most intriguing. The orbiting junk is soundless, in the vacuum of space. Ryan and his team conceived, planned and created ‘Machine 9’ a handcrafted electromechanical sound instrument that tracks the position of 27,000 pieces of space junk, transforming them into sound, in real time, as they pass over the machine’s location.
The result is a fascinating aural study giving voice to the voiceless discarded remnants of our journeys into the cosmos.
