The Inevitable Ether: Opening + Panel

The Inevitable Ether Exhibition showcases work and research by Emilia Tapprest and Valerie van Zuijlen, artists-in-residence at Greywood Arts and the National Space Centre. Valerie and Emilia will use their residency to film and develop immersive and poetic scenes for their docu-fiction film project Our Side of the Moon. Audiences will have a window into the artist’s practice through the use of multi-screen setups that map the mood and rhetoric of this particular moment in time in relation to space.

Our Side of the Moon follows a group of individuals who are drawn to an archaic form of radio-communication that bounces messages off the moon and puts them in contact with strangers around the world. The story follows Diana, a brilliant young radio astronomer living under the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands, and her ‘moonbouncing’ penpal Atari, based at the squatted Elfordstown Earthstation. Marked by a chronic mutism, Diana possesses a special skill: sound-to-movement synesthesia, a condition which allows her to ‘feel’ sound as muscular responses in her body. A strange radio message that bounces off the moon’s surface every day is rumoured to be a response to the legendary space probes Voyager 1 and 2, however, Diana’s synesthetic capabilities allow her to discover a different truth, which catapults her into a journey to the other side of the moon…

Alongside the video installation will be collaborative works created by 100 young people from St. Fergals National School (Killeagh), Gaelscoil Mhainister na Corann (Midleton), and the Greywood Arts Youth Club that have participated in our STEAM programme. Facilitated by artist Roisín White, young people have learned  how both photographs and space telescopes use light to give us pictures of the past. The young artists have created photographic images that utilise Morse code to project their questions for the universe into outer space.

https://spacefest.ie/the-inevitable-ether-emilia-tapprest-valerie-van-zuijlen/