ABSOLUT ART BAR x HARSHA BISWAJIT
ABSOLUT ART BAR x HARSHA BISWAJIT
ABSOLUT SPACE
Site-Specific Installation
Absolut Art Bar, Chennai, India, March 2019
57ft / 18m tunnel in fibreglass + 6 installation rooms
Commissioned by Absolut
ABSOLUT SPACE is a commissioned site-specific installation conceived for Absolut Art Bar in Chennai, India. Taking as its starting point NASA's Voyager Golden Records — the phonograph discs affixed to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977 containing images, sounds, and greetings in nearly sixty languages — the work turns the question of civilisational self-representation into an immersive spatial experience.
If those records, now billions of kilometres from Earth, could one day be the only traces of human civilisation, what would we choose to include? What image of ourselves would we send forward? The installation unfolds across a 57-foot fibreglass space tunnel — inspired by the stargate sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey — and six discrete rooms, each exploring a different fragment of what it means to construct a time capsule for a future we will not inhabit.
ARTIST NOTE
INSTALLATION DETAILS
57ft /18m Long Space Tunnel built using fiberglass whose design was inspired by a scene from Stanley Kubrik’s film, ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ and 6 installation rooms within the tunnel that the audience can access and experience as they walk through the space.
CONCEPT NOTE
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 & 2 on a historic journey into deep space. Affixed to each spacecraft was a phonograph record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilizations, or future humans that might encounter it in some distant space and time. Each record contained images, audio recordings, music from our planet, and greetings in almost sixty human languages selected to portray the diversity of life on earth. Since these spacecrafts could last billions of years, these circular time capsules could one day be the only traces of human civilization.
Inspired by these records, I conceptualized “ABSOLUT SPACE” as a way to explore these fragments of information now floating somewhere in the far reaches of interstellar space to instigate a dialog on how we would construct an image of earth and create an experience to reflect on how we would produce our own time capsule for the future.
