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Lei Cox: Catching Sight of Sputnik - Flight Plan of Flyer 1
Reflections on R&D Project, by Lei Cox
Published March 2008
One small step into the mind of a space cadet: The two halves of my brain swirl harmoniously; they continually merge between art and science then fact and then fiction. Every now and then this harmony is interrupted as the two halves temporarily separate, then flip over, and over, in a repetitive cycle of repulsion and attraction. My creative process then begins. I must clarify that this is not at all painful! I profess that this is nothing new and of course a lot of us think like this. We are fascinated by both the worlds of art and science and occasionally we create in the space in between.
Down to Earth Right here and right now I contemplate the new strands that are evolving inside my ideas, research and artistic practice. In doing so I can identify substantial links that arc back to an older work entitled «The Size of Things», which I made over twenty years ago. In those days, and amongst other things, I was preoccupied with the notion of leaving our planet earth and finding a new one to inhabit. To some extent the mind candy of Godfrey Reggio’s and Phillip Glass’s film «Koyaanisqatsi (life out of balance)» and the words in Brian Easlea’s «Fathering the Unthinkable», had set me off.
The Size of Things
I would make my odyssey in an attempt to construct and establish my new world. I consumed a ferocious and contradictory diet of science fiction and scientific fact, and in parallel I found myself reading both mythology and history. Today I am still inspired by the laws of science, particularly and especially the wonders of gravity. And even now I am still fascinated by both the tales of Icarus and Daedalus and the memoirs of Neil Armstrong.
Quite Precisely, September 1965 to July 1969 I suppose the inspiration for my new art works at KHiB began some 42 years ago. Born between the space race and the darkest moments of the cold war I can trace the swirling viscose elements of inspiration. Whilst just four years old I remember drinking coke a cola and eating crisps, lying on the living room shag pile acrylic carpet with my feet pressed hard against the oil filled radiator watching Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins preparing for blastoff on the monochrome telly.
I so desperately wanted to go with them but a frequent intermittent TV commercial interrupted my pre-flight nerves and apprehension for launch. A drink-more-milk advertisement crudely represented a super close-up, tilting macro-crane shot of a bottle of milk as if on a launch pad and accompanied by «Also sprach Zarathustra». I thought that the bottle of milk was the rocket and the Strauss a countdown.
Escaping then Chasing Realism Approximately a year before finding myself in Bergen I forced a specific change in my practice. I decided to «kill-off» Lei Cox the performance to camera artist and make him disappear completely in a piece titled «The Teleportation Experiment». The piece ends with the subject teleporting into another place and perhaps into another time dimension. Gone, so I thought, forever! I guess I became tired of working with myself in a video black void or a computer-generated landscape in an artificial world.
So, I started working on some completely different bodies of work based on a twisted reality. I began working on macro flower prints made from dissected scans of flower parts, altered panoramic landscape photography, a collaborative camera obscura public artwork with artist Mel Woods and architect Fergus Purdie and new and ongoing video piece titled «Into the blue», which playfully depicts exploding jet airliners.
Into the blue
But now, and quite strangely, a contradictory reversion has occurred. Cox is back and performing again but now out of the sterility and control of the video studio and in the real-world landscape. And in contemplating why this is so I can conclude that my quest of achieving a reality is no longer a prerequisite, there is enough reality around me that can be creatively enhanced.
My New Artistic Research Work at KHiB I am now in the preproduction phase of a two part video artwork inspired by the first powered flight in 1903 and the first moon landing of 1969. I plan to recreate the flight path of the Wright Brothers Flyer 1 airplane, which was never filmed. And then to reawaken the Apollo 11 moon landing conspiracy theory from the perspective of a performance artist using contemporary digital trickery, narrative irony and some tall stories! Both works will be shot on location in USA in the early summer of 2008.
The production of «Flight Plan of Flyer 1» will take place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where I will research artefacts and photographs to understand where to position my camera. High Definition Recordings will be made from studied angles and will be combined with helmet shots from a microlite aircraft. These will constitute the background layers of a composite structure where blue screen studio shots of Flyer 1 will be superimposed in take off, flight and landing with the artist as the pilot.
Flight Plan of Flyer 1
The Second location for «Catching Sight of Sputnik» is by the roadside by the Moab Desert in Utah, which will be Shot Day for Night as to resemble the surface of the moon. Magnificent stars will be digitally painted to adorn the sky. Overhead a small speck silently glides by. It is Sputnik. We can hear its transmission beeping a semaphore message - «One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind». The performer steps then leaps into frame, this is replicated over an over again becoming a rhythmic tribal dance. Eventually the real moon rises over the hills, the stars fade away. As the set returns to daylight, a freight truck roars by the shot and the conspiracy is reviled.
Catching Sight of Sputnik
I guess that these two works constitute the beginning of a new phase or series. I have once again become fascinated with our obsession of pushing the envelope into the unknown. So, why fly like the birds, why do we reach for the Moon, why do we want to be the fastest on planet Earth, why climb Everest, why traverse Antarctica and why plant a flag on the bottom of the sea under the North Pole?
To be continued…
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