Info
On the Silver Globe (I) is an installation made by the WROcenter Group: Piotr Krajewski in cooperation with Bartek Korzeniowski (2012), Michał Michałczak (2017) and Jerzy Szota (2017). In 2017, it was gifted to the collection of the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation by the WRO Center for Media Art Foundation.
The installation is presented as part of the permanent exhibition in Sokolowsko (Villa Rosa). The official opening of the installation took place on July 22, 2017, during the 7th edition of the International Festival of Ephemeral Art Contexts 2017.
The installation has been inspired by photographs made by Zygmunt Rytka during live TV broadcast from the first manned landing on the Moon, also using part of the transmission – nowadays available on the net as a cultural fact. It refers to the visions of the 20th century, mankind aspirations’ in pursuit of “space exploration” and the history of television as a material and cultural phenomena.
The installation includes:
– photographs by Zygmunt Rytka, made on the night of July 20, 1969, depicting the first man on the Moon, and the board: “We have just finished the transmission from the moon”, released by the Polish Television after the broadcast;
– a YouTube video, downloaded from the Internet, featuring an American astronaut, Neil Armstrong, during his first walk on the moon; we can also hear his voice and singing (it is an excerpt from the TV broadcast that was a “cosmic” media phenomenon in 1969 and is now a historical cultural record deposited on the web);
– the sequence of a characteristic white noise, distinctive for an unmodified TV signal, one of the first technical phenomena that depicts the nature of chaos.
The projection of the Moon’s images was made on the original CRT from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. the so-called “silver globe” due to the characteristic afterglow it emits. Just like the moon, the convex surface of the silver screen reflects both the light and the visions it creates.