Oh, brother...as if the ISS didn't have enough problems as it is:
Developing a cultural policy for the International Space Station

The International Space Station is a great achievement of human ingenuity and international cooperation, as well as a cutting-edge research facility. But the European Space Agency believes strongly that the cultural world too should have a say in the future of space exploration..."

And...they would believe that, wouldn't they? I wonder how the prospective participating artists would feel about engineers and scientists (not to mention entrepreneurs) having a say in the future of "art" and "culture", or offering "critical commentary" on their own work and its value to society?

"...We therefore want to open the ISS to a new community of artistic and cultural users," emphasises Daniel Sacotte, ESA's Director of Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration.

"Vood you like to touch my Mummenschanz?"

"This new study sets out to investigate and focus the real interest of the cultural world in the International Space Station, to generate a policy for involving cultural users in the ISS programme in the longer term and to develop a first representative set of ready-to-implement demonstrator projects in arts, culture and media," explains Dieter Isakeit, Head of the Erasmus User Centre for the International Space Station, who is supervising the study on the ESA side, "and in order to provide potential future cultural users with the full context for their engagement with the ISS programme, the study also aims to examine and articulate the contemporary social and cultural significance of the Station in the larger sense of human space exploration."

Why am I not surprised that this bit of fluffy-cheese artspeak was burbled up by a man whose surname strikingly resembles a colloquialism for a drug-induced state?

It's not that I'm against artist participation in the ISS as such -- it's possible that the participating artists could produce good material (something NASA's equivalent arts programs have managed to accomplish). The problem I see is the high probability of this effort turning into a mockery, producing "critiques" of the cultural oedipal complex inherent in the violent phallo-penetrative symbolism of the docking maneuver and the associated sociolinguistic oppression of wymyn by the appropriation of the homonymous term "berthing". Etc. I mean...these are sophisticated Europeans we're talking about.

Posted by T.L. James on May 21, 2005 12:38 AM