The Association
of Autonomous Astronauts is a non-hierarchical network of local, community-based
space exploration programmes. Disconaut AAA
was set up to explore the potential of dance cultures for autonomous space exploration.
You can see other Disconaut material at www.uncarved.demon.co.uk/disconaut/.
Our e-mail address is practicalhistory@
hotmail.com or you can write to us c/o Practical History, 121 Railton Road,
London SE24.
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In April 1998 the Disconauts took part in the second Intergalactic Conference
of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts in Bologna, the only city we've
visited with a street named after Yuri Gagarin.
The conference provided an opportunity for us to consolidate our programme
of community-based space exploration. A report of the events has already
been produced by Raido
AAA (published in Ad Astra). Here we want to offer some more impressionistic
reflections on the whole experience.
The conference began for us with a journey involving four trains and an
aeroplane. It was a journey that provided us with some useful material for
consideration of travel by other means to further destinations.
Our presentation at the conference , We are
not alone, was to review the recent explosion of interest in space in popular
culture. Our thesis that the dreams of autonomous astronauts risked being recuperated
by commercial interests was confirmed soon after we had passed under the River
Thames from South London. On an underground train at Whitechapel an advertisement
promised "with AOL the person seated next to you can also travel to the
surface of Mars". The small print clarified that access to Mars was via
an internet connection with the NASA website (AOL is an internet provider).
The launchpad for our flight to Milan was Stanstead Airport. A few weeks
after returning from Bologna we came across a book called "Norman Foster
and the Architecture of Flight" extolling the supposed wonders of the
beloved cathedral of light that is Stanstead and its principal architect.
A live rendering of Brian Enoís Music for Airports was performed
there around the same time.
To us it just felt like just another sterile place to wait and spend - a
shopping mall with a runway attached. This "architecture of flight"
is light years away from the launchpads we have in mind for autonomous spaceflight.
It is in fact an architecture of control, restricting who has access to
flight, restricting the movement of people and things, channelling all travellers
into the field of vision of cops, customs officers and immigration officials.
On the plane a found object proved useful. We had prepared a series of A4
panels for the conference illustrating "Means of Flight - an alphabet
for autonomous astronauts". This outlined a range of approaches people
have tried to experience the sensation of flight, including ballet, characterised
according to one dance historian by "the dancersí appearance
of lightness and the seeming effortlessness with which they launched themselves
through the air, as if gravity were nothing but a minor inconvenience to
the dancing body".
In mid-flight we came across a bilingual (Italian/English) magazine cum
design catalogue called Slamp. Included in it was a striking photo
of Rudolf Nureyev suspended in mid-air (performing in ëLuciferí,
New York, 1975) and an accompanying article stressing the human bodyís
ability "to defy the force of gravity, as was actually scientifically
observed in the case of mythical Russian dancers, Nijinski and Nureyev".
This picture was swiftly torn out and added to our display.
There were further connections in the same publication: a "Sun Ra Collection"
of designer lamps (more commercial recuperation?) and a picture of an alarmingly
phallic "Chronomorphic spaceship" with the caption: "The
spaceship is prepared for the journey it must face like an ammunition clip
which consumes itself flowing slowly, changing its shape on the basis of
the time travelled during the journey. Thus the length of the spaceship
is not measured in spatial units but in temporal units".
The act of translating "Means of Flight" also proved instructive.
We had argued that it is no coincidence that so many fairground rides feature
rockets and spaceships because fairgrounds are the astronaut training centres
of the working class, a place where we get to experiment with gravity and
its effects on the body. Our thesis was dramatically confirmed by our Italian/English
dictionary. The Italian for fairground: Luna Park.
Our hotel was in Via Rizzoli, opposite the leaning brick towers described
by Percy Shelley on his visit to Bologna in 1818: "There are two towers
here, one 400 foot high, ugly things built out of brick which lean both
different ways, and with the delusion of moonlight shadows you almost fancy
the city is rocked by an earthquake". In his poetry, Shelley anticipated
some of the themes explored 180 years later by the AAA, combining a passion
for radical politics and human self-determination with an interest in astronomy.
His Queen
Mab features a chariot flight to the stars from where the fairy queen
denounces the rule of kings, priests and commerce.
Shelley believed that poets had a clairvoyant function as "the mirrors
of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present". It is possible
that what Shelley sensed in Bologna was not a trick of the light but an
echo of the future earthquakes that would shake the city: the social earthquake
of 1977, when the city was the centre of conflicts between the subversive
movement and the old order, or possibly the city being shaken to its foundations
by a AAA rocket exiting gravity from the Bologna launchpad early in the
21st century.
The venue for the conference was the Link in Via Fioravanti, a former
warehouse described in the Rough Guide to Italy as a "centro sociale"
with "a cyber style bar upstairs and an enormous dancefloor downstairs.
Avant garde performance art... with ambient or techno sounds later".
We pondered whether we were to be served up as performance art for a curious
audience.
The main session of the conference featured presentations from AAA groups
based in various earth sectors including England, France, Italy
and Austria (detailed in Raido
AAAís report). There were some very interesting contributions,
although for future conferences we would like to move away from the format
of a platform of speakers addressing the audience from the front - in space
there is no front or back.
After a meal in the Linkís café, the party kicked off. The
Link is obviously a top night out for the Bologna massive. Coldcut and On
U Sound are recent visitors, and sometime Portishead DJ Andy Smith has listed
the Link as his favourite place to DJ (Mixmag, July 1998). As well as three
separate dance spaces, there is a bar, a café and a bookshop. Most
of the 1000+ people there hadnít been at the day conference, although
the AAA presence was strongly represented at the party with AAA DJs at the
controls in two of the rooms and the AAA logo flashing on video monitors
throughout.
"Raves in Space" are a central feature of the AAA programme, but
there is an ongoing debate about what the future sounds of outer space should
be. While we strongly defend blissed out glammed up disco hedonism, others
feel that this is too commercial and that only more experimental electronica
is appropriate.
In our view it is the relations formed between people in a sonic situation
that determines its liberatory potential, not how formally radical the music
itself is. Thus a mixed gay/ straight/ black/ white/ male/ female crowd
dancing at a free party to house music takes us further out of this world
than, say, ten boys stroking their goatees to techno at the ICA.
Nevertheless our experience of the distorted beats and sonic terrorism played
in the "Rave in Space" and "Anti Ambient" areas in Bologna
convinced us that this has a specific role to play in astronaut training.
Dancing to unpredictable rhythms simulates the impact of take off, with
the body pulled in different directions by sudden changes in gravitational
effects. The experience was intensified through severe strobe lighting,
disrupting the use of visual coordinates to navigate by.
With 4:4 beats on the other hand the body can settle into automatic motion.
This can, however, free the imagination to take flight, itself a very useful
faculty for would-be astronauts.
Patric OíBrien (East London AAA) gave a conference presentation
on Reclaim the Stars, an event to be held in East London on the summer solstice
drawing on the work of Giordano Bruno. Bruno was burnt in Rome by the Inquisition
for his heretical views including his support for Copernicus' understanding
that the earth moves around the sun rather than the other way round.
Bruno's fate is symptomatic of an age in which the question of our relationship
to the stars was a matter of life and death. Evidence of the importance
of this relationship was furnished on our Sunday morning wander around the
city. We spent some time in San Petriono, a 14th century cathedral featuring
ëan astronomical clock - a long brass meridian line set at an angle
across the floor, with a hole left in the roof for the sun to shine through
onto the right spotí. The signs of the zodiac were marked along the
line, as was the winter solstice.
Reclaiming the stars will involve regaining this sense of an intimate connection
between human beings and the wider cosmos, while freeing it from much of
the traditional baggage of the kind of astrology used by kings and priests
to maintain their power in Bologna and elsewhere.
Sunday afternoon was set aside for a AAA training day in the giardini
margherita, a fine park on the outskirts of the city. Unfortunately rain
had stopped play in the three-sided football game by the time we got there.
We were however able to undertake some astronaut training of our own, experimenting
with gravity on the parkís trampolines.
While one Disconaut displayed a very primitive technique, another managed
to execute a180 degree turn in mid air. In every trampoline jump there comes
a moment of near weightlessness, that split second when the body slows down
and seems to freeze in mid-air before being pulled back to earth. By concentrating
on this moment it is possible to stretch it, in imaginative time at least,
and to get a clear sense of the workings of gravity on the body.
We are now considering proposals to hold the next AAA Intergalactic Conference
in London. Space 1999 will develop some of the ideas from Bologna as well
as including new elements such as a structured experiential programme of
astronaut training. The dates have provisionally been set for the 19th-26th
June 1999. Contact us for further details.
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