Louise K. Wilson, 'Science Museum London, 1997'
In: Artists-in Research 1996-98. Edited by Alistair Raphael and Victoria Clarke. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 46-53.
Profits from the hugely successful Great Exhibition of 1851 were used to purchase land in South Kensington and establish institutions devoted to the promotion of science and technology. The government's science and art department established the South Kensington Museum in 1857 from which the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum have subsequently developed. The displays in the museums comprised of art objects although the 'science collection', as it was known, included model apparatus, examples of materials, books and educational resources. Both collections were boosted by an international exhibition in 1876 of science instruments. Gradually assuming their identity, the science and art collections were housed separately in the Science Museum which was opened by King George V in 1928. In 1980, objects from the Wellcome Collection were placed on permanent display.
The research opportunity sought to focus the range of possibilities that a museum of this size and historical importance might present to artists and we opted to work primarily with two curators; Ghislaine Lawrence in the department of Clinical Medicine and Doug Millard in Space Technology. The medical collection is based on the personal collection of Henry S. Wellcome. An amateur anthropologist and historian, he massed the largest collection of medical paraphernalia, with agents acquiring objects on his belhalf from all over the world. The collection includes gold pomanders, medieval statuary, Egyptian Mummies, surgical instruments, Florentine waxes and anatomical dissections. The Space Technology department contains exhibits of rockets, satellites, spacecraft and other hardware. Audiovisual exhibits document the history of space flight how rockets work, the experiments of British and European space development as well as rocket explorers' missions to other planets. Louise K Wilson also had full access to the galleries as well as some of the huge collections not on public display.
Notions of research are fundamental to my work with processes of interviewing and documenting being made visible in subsequent installations. In 1997 I spent over thirty days at the Science Museum in London, specifically researching material from the Exploration of Space Gallery and the Museum's library. Prior to the residency, my work had touched upon my fascination with Space travel and the 'technological sublime' but I was keen to look again at strategies of display and interaction within museums. I had some initial ideas to explore, but was curious to see how far one might 'get under the skin' of such an institution.
Since there was no regularly available workspace or access to communications at the Science Museum itself, early on my time there was peripatetic and many hours were spent wandering the halls, looking at exhibits and observing demonstrations. The stylistic differences in these educational and interpretative events and displays were intriguing, from the explosive launch pad demonstration of rocket physics to a fictionalised account of Edward Muybridge's life and photographic methodology as told by one of his period-costumed 'models'.
Inadvertently finding oneself in the midst of a guided tour could be disorientating. Once I watched an actor, wearing a baggy space suit and speaking in faltering American accent, describe what it was like to orbit the Earth and lose 'friends' in the 1967 launch pad fire. The Apollo 10 capsule in which he had 'travelled' was the touchstone for the most tangible enthusiasm in the gallery and a useful listening post to overhear random exchanges - particularly those between parents and children - where layers of fiction and myths surrounding these collections of material artefacts jostle.
Two subsequent audio/sculptural pieces, Enactment and Capsule, were made as a response to the notion of the Museum as a 'dream space' where 'real' objects attract shifting meanings and actors narrate technological histories. Enactment/Leaving the Lunar Surface (Extract) was a CD soundtrack in which two actors (from an amateur dramatics theatre company), speak words originally uttered across Space. In this case the work is a re-enactment of the voices of the astronauts and ground crew from the Apollo 11 mission at the point at which the Lunar Module crew are preparing to leave the Moon's surface. Enactment also sprung from that summer's crises on-board MIR - confirming the ongoing correlation of Space with drama - as well as from groups such as Sealed Knot (who stage their own version of battles from the English Civil War).
Doug Millard, the Curator of Space Technology, was a generous interviewee and discussions with him touched upon a range of subjects: the historic role of the Museum; the widely differing curatorial styles it supports; imaginary museums; linked history(ies) of Space Technology; science fiction; NASA narratives; the militaristic roots of Space Technology; and the origins of the Space Race. He also spoke about the shock wave, which Sputnik had apparently induced, as well as the subsequent contradictory US responses to the second Russian satellite.
For an imminent exhibition in Toronto, I began researching visual and textual elements at the Science Museum's library at Imperial College (which specialises in the History of Science and the Public Understanding of Science). The starting point for Oneironaut © (1997), a video installation, was an exploration into the launch of the first dog in space on-board Sputnik II in 1957. At that time the technology to return Space capsules safely to Earth had not yet been invented. Numerous relevant articles from journals and books including:'Sleep In Space', 'Biosputniks:The Use by the Soviet Union and Russia of Dogs', 'Monkeys and other Animals in the Exploration of Space, 1949-93', 'Space Medicine in Project Mercury' etc. were collected to inform the textual commentary for Oneironaut ©. The title, meaning literally 'dream traveller', refers to lucid dreaming where the dreamer may be consciously aware and able to influence dream content. The soundtrack invites the listener to re-consider the fate of Laika, to reverse the trajectory of the doomed satellite and to return the dog to Earth.
Interviews were also conducted with other Museum curators, namely Dr Ghislaine Lawrence (Clinical Medicine) and Tim Boon (Public Health), to discuss the semiotics of exhibition design. Subsequent contracts were established outside of the Museum, including Brian Durrans, Keeper at the Museum of Mankind, who has conducted extensive research into the history and psychology of time capsules. Capsule (1997) is a wall-mounted, sealed, stainless steel capsule that contains the 700-plus pages of the flight transcript from Apollo 11. I had tracked down a copy of this document, via NASA, to David Woods, a Scottish space enthusiast who has transcribed a number of Apollo missions. Unlike the Voyager space probes, launched from earth twenty years ago containing a cargo of 'miscrocosmic' representations of Earth culture, Capsule is intended for eventual ground storage.
The Museum's other resources were available for research. Early on in the residency Doug Millard arranged a visit to the Museum's store in the old post sorting office at Blythe House in South Kensington, London. The surplus stock of space food and sections of V2 rocket heads form the Exploration of Space Gallery is relatively small (most of the space items are stored in the larger Wiltshire store). The Museum's current salon de refusé is an extraordinary and poignant spectacle - vast halls containing telescopes and vitrines displaying displaced orreries and globes.
I also used the Museum's Photo Library to record images of obsolete technologies such as the Flying Bedstead (1940s) and the Brain Wave Synchroniser (1958). One particularly resonant photograph shows a young schoolboy sitting in the cockpit of a Link flight simulator: "Dreams of Breaking the Sound Barrier - David tries out the controls, 29 December 1953". This image is to be used for the Mechanic Modulations issue of Angelaki for which my text, Gravity and Awkwardness, constructs a partial history of motion sickness; from space medicine to roller coaster and IMAX entertainment.
The experiences of research in such rich and contradictory environments often takes time to percolate. Subsequent pieces have a continuing interest for me regarding the representation of space, the influences of cinematic Science Fiction, the personification of the amateur enthusiast and discourses of the post-human. Last Summer I visited the NASA history office in Washington (researching press material about Space Medicine) and the Disneyesque Space Centre in Houston to get limited visitor access to astronaut training facilities at NASA's Johnson Space Centre. A piece currently in progress involves a confluence of amateur rocketeers and medical research to address a fascination with defying gravity.