Testing Ground Installation: two-way mirror, Exolith Lab Lunar Highlands planetary surface simulant. Dimensions and specific design are variable depending on the exhibition context. Concept developed as part of Land Art Agency's Sustainable Futures: Outer Space residency, 2021. Dimensions variable.
Testing Ground is a sculptural installation of a landscape made from planetary surface simulants and informed by dialogue with Dr Daniel Britt & Prof Valerie Olson. The landscape acts as a stage for the unfolding of a series of interventions crossing sculpture, text and performance that ask questions around the agency of and our kinship with 'non-living', extraterrestrial planetary bodies, which are looming targets for human expansion and resource extraction beyond Earth.
The work references large scale Earth Science experiments such as the Landscape Evolution Observatory in Arizona, where abiotic soil is rigged up to multiple scientific sensors for monitoring its chemical composition as it evolves – as well as a response to the NASA Mars Yard, where surface simulants are used to test scientific instruments and equipment such as rovers, prior to their deployment in outer space environments. Testing Ground however, provides a space for speculative encounters, for testing how we as humans, can and should relate to other worlds.
The installation walls are constructed from two-way mirror, so depending on the viewer’s position and focus, they are met with illusory and layered perspectives. Experientially, this aims to open a liminal zone of contact for the viewer/participant. It can be experienced and interacted with in different ways throughout the course of an exhibition. In its simplest gesture, through speculative encounter the installation asks what it means to make contact – to place a hand or foot – on alien terrain.
Planned interventions and performances are also be staged. For instance, as part of Land Art Agency Sustainable Futures residency a live choral work was devised that provides a speculative listening to the regolith. Inspired by Elizabeth Povinelli’s remarks in Geoontologies about ‘the movement of the experience of noise (phonos) into the experience of sense (logos)’: How might we attune to or come to hear the ‘voice’ of the extra-terrestrial non living?