One Year on from Satellite Stories

January 17th, 2010

I went back to the Mullard Space Science Lab one year after doing the Satellite Stories event there.

I wanted to find out what people remembered from it and if anything had changed. I’d thought that the sunset to darkness walk round the grounds with the scientists and engineers telling their stories, would be a memorable event, a way for people to remember what was being said better than through a formal lecture. At least what happened is that people surely heard things they wouldn’t have heard in a formal lecture. The memory part: I’m not sure if people really remembered what was said. Maybe what they were left with was a memory of what happened, that some thing unusual had happened with the science and the things that were said and the way they were said.

My day was that mixture again of exhilaration to be allowed to be included and listen in on the extraordinary circumstances of the place and that isolation of being the person from the opposite side of the world asking question and hoping for things that will never really come into existence, being misunderstood and being wrong about my assumptions.

Things had changed. Lucie said that the local people had been included in the planning process for the next open day. That instead of them deciding what people would like, they asked. The locals had a list of topics. I don’t know that they wanted Satellite Stories again. I don’t think that would ever have come about through asking people what they wanted. People like to stay to the paths. Satellite Stories was about creating a new path so that if somebody did want to walk along it, they could. There are the boundaries in people’s heads to deal with. For the moment though the Lab and local people want to be friends now they’ve met.

I think I underestimate too, how much interaction the scientists there have with visiting groups. I should ask Lucie for a typical week, because there is a constant flow here. She said there were motivators starting to appear. There’s a section in the grant application forms for ‘impact’ and it means describing the connection with the public. I’ve been reading “Science in Public” and it traces the science/public debate in UK from around the 80’s, so I imagine these kinds of inclusions derive from this and public policy making.

Lucie said of the meeting:
“We’ve agreed that as well as us doing events where the community come in, we’ll also (start to go out). Another thing they wanted, a lot of then have got telescopes so thought it would be fantastic if we had an evening when we all brought our telescopes up and we had an observing event. So that will be the next thing I organize…I thought that’s such a good idea. I’d never thought about something where they actually bring their telescopes in…It was really nice to have the opportunity to hear what they wanted, rather than trying to second guess. Yeah and it was a direct result of having Satellite Stories and starting to think about a two-way dialogue and having something on an equal footing, rather than just saying this is what we’re going to do.”

So next I talked to Myrto. I wanted to know about her conversations with people. She told me about this point of interaction. She said she was really amazed at how much interest there was in what they do, in astrophysics/space science. It made her sure they should be doing more of it, these interactions. She came across a difference in the kind of interest she has, as a professional scientists and the kind of interest she met. In the work she does, she said that things like counting galaxies can be as pedestrian as counting boxes. There are few moments when you encounter the ‘bigger picture’ and it was this ‘bigger picture’ that people were interested in. She said it was odd how big a step it was to get into their mind set, but that it was a good thing to do. She knew that what she was saying was very curious. I thought that what she was saying was that these thoughts she was expressing only happened through an encounter, in conversation. The one we were having and the ones she was describing.

“Its very difficult to understand how the public views this whole science, its, its very difficult for me and I guess for a lot of other professionals because we’re in it and its hard to see it from someone who’s not, from the point of view of someone who’s not in it, but from the reactions that I get, it shows that people are fascinated, they want to know more, they’re very interested. But I don’t understand, I sort of understand why they would find it fascinating but I can’t feel what they feel.”

Then I talked to someone who’s name I’ve mixed up and it was that encounter that makes me feel like giving up. He hadn’t been at Satellite Stories, but I wanted to know what he thought had happened. I wondered if anyone had talked about it after or if everyone had gone silent about the ‘weird thing’. He said, it was something about pictures - people told you stories and you drew pictures of what you thought they were. Nightmare, the usual story of the artist drawing pictures. Really demoralising. Much later, I realised that he had actually listened to what I’d said. When I was first researching I’d been saying things like, I like the picture people draw in my head when they tell me about the spacecraft they work on.I mean what would anybody make of that. And really, he had a good idea for me. That’s exactly what I should do, or do with a group of people, children, artists, students - a drawing class. Bring people in to talk only and see what can be drawn. It would be a great collaboration - call it “artists’ impressions”!

Then the engineers in the drawing room. It wasn’t the best day for insights. Last time I left with the richest descriptions of Baikonour and Kourou launch sites. This time, I couldn’t really gauge whether Satellite stories had been a good idea. But what was anyone suppose to make of it. I think by this time I was hoping that maybe somebody would realise that I hadn’t done this as a workshop, I’d done it as an artwork and it had form and depth and structure, it was avant garde, a hybrid of materials and media. Many things and as often happens with artworks, many things taken for granted and seemingly lost.

I asked about the change that happens when a spacecraft leaves the earth. Yes, the Japanese change the name of the spacecraft once it is launched. Good for them. At least there’s the possibility there of someone in the space science field acknowledging that a philosophical change also happens. But nobody in the drawing room seemed to want to have the conversation about perception.

My favourite thing is to talk to Andrew Coates. He loves to talk about what he does and as Associate Director, I suspect that he has the choice to put himself on the most imaginative and exploratory of missions. The next morning at 7 am Cassini would be passing through a belt of ions, around Enceladus and he couldn’t wait to pick up the data and have that feeling of being the first to know, see, experience a new view of that planet, of the nature of our solar system and the universe. That night he was to be giving an after dinner speech for a group of Actuaries. He wasn’t sure what he would talk about, but I thought he should tell them what he’d just told me about Cassini and 7 am the next morning.

I wrote in my notebook - it seems like he’s constantly communicating and in this mindspace of finding out what people are interested in. There are these great communicators (in science) – I realize I’m hatching a theory that the public participation is the thing that generates the realization of what is exciting, that creates the drive and uncannily rich thinking-

Before this I’d sat in the Common Room, feeling the project to be a waste of energy for the lack of interpretation. I guess I thought I’d tried to help people at the Lab, but nobody seemed to realise, when Hervé came by. He hadn’t been there either, but we had a long talk nonetheless about what I’d been trying to do. He thought it was about bringing the old stories of the place to people there now, which it partly was, well very much was, bringing the stories of the people together.

“I thought for me you were trying to make people remember everything that happened, in a creative way, an artistical way. I think somehow you did it because you approached the problem differently. People – I don’t know, I wasn’t there! Its difficult for me to comment. ”

But it didn’t really matter that he hadn’t been there and didn’t know: he made me feel better about the whole thing. And the feeling bad is about finding the invisible boundaries. Its kind of like commando work.

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