Just over a month ago, on October 9th, NASA successfully completed its Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission when a spacecraft crashed its payload into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s polar regions. Sent on a suicide mission, the unmanned LCROSS spacecraft investigated indications of water on the moon by colliding kamikaze-like into the lunar surface, sending up subsequent plumes of debris which have since been analyzed for signs of lunar water ice. Making a dent, we have started to sculpt extraterrestrial bodies. Recent events would seem to suggest that Stephen Kaltenbach’s fantasy, science-fiction proposals for cosmic art actions might be perilously close to coming into being.

Kaltenbach, whose concept-driven art has often taken the form of proposals and project drawings since the mid-60s, here presents a suite of ten charcoal, pastel, and acrylic drawings representing impossibly grandiose and absurdly spectacular ideas to be executed in outer space. The moon is frequently his target: Blasted Luna Seas, 2007, would turn its upturned crescent into the piercing smile of a celestial happy face by retargeting the world’s arsenal of icbms to blast two ovals on the moon during the first quarter. Similarly, Flaming Eight Ball, 2002, converts the dark disc of the moon during a solar eclipse into a menacingly colossal eight ball illuminated by the light of choreographed thermonuclear missile explosions. Stellated Moon, 2007, suggests a topographical excavation of the lunar landscape to transform its spherical banality into a festively colored stellated polyhedron.

Though he deals in epic landscape interventions, these proposals are more than Earthworks, they are works beyond the earth, literally out of this world. It is an unsettling and creepily alien place to be, as ‘s fear, 2008, the large steel, bomb-like sphere weighing three quarters of a ton and periodically emitting grinding moans from its vacuum-sealed core out in the gallery’s lobby, will not let us forget. The drawings are beautiful and reckless ‘what ifs’, like hallucinatory drug fantasies from an electro-apocalyptic trip rendered comically playful and poetic by their unreality and the blatancy of their futility.

Farcically out-scaled ambitions betray an exuberant embrace of inevitable failure, when, with something like pride, the artist calls many of his works ‘bad ideas’. Impossibility is rarely so freeing, so productive: the skies open up and Kaltenbach has the entire universe available to him. Structured Nebula, 2008, for instance, dreams of colorful and glittering nebulae corralled into a perfect floating donut ring many parsecs across. It can’t happen, I assure myself, embarrassed by the idiotically obvious. And even if it could, it shouldn’t. But it can’t, so relax. Out of enthusiasm for the latter, Kaltenbach questions the difference between fiction and ‘bad ideas,’ wrongness. His proposals sneakily appeal to our disturbing fascination with fabulous disasters and titillating catastrophes; their imagined beauty swelling with the imagined enormity of their imagined wreckage. And, finally, he teaches the rewards of not taking some things, some art, seriously.

-- Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Picking up where we left off: It turns out, as of November 13th, that NASA’s LCROSS mission has definitively confirmed that, yes, there is indeed water (billion-year-old ice) on the moon. This is exciting news for extraterrestrial life everywhere. And for the prospect of actualizing science-fiction’s most basic dream of widespread space travel and extended human expeditions, extra-planetary colonies. The ramifications for the hopes of future lunar exploration and settlement are huge: not only would future settlers have something to drink, but the water could be broken in oxygen to breath and the components of rocket fuel. 2012ers fear the news comes too late for practical benefit, but certainly not a day too soon. Anticipating this day and in preparation for the psychological hurtles that lie ahead, JPL musicologist (and sometime 2012er), Kyoto Traitee, has developed a special conditioning chamber called the Isolated Memory Forgetting Room (Excelsis Deo) or, IMFR(ED).

IMFR(ED) harnesses phase-inversion music techniques to produce sonic mind-altering technology. Complementary frequencies are phase-shifted and pumped into an empty, gallery-like white cube so that the crests and troughs of sound waves cancel out and neither pitch is heard. 1 + (-1) = 0. The sound that results is apparent silence. But it is a thick and full silence carrying much auditory information that bypasses conscious-brain understanding and goes directly to id-level, subconscious realms. There is pressure on the subject’s ears.

Traitee, who actually has no science training or astronomical expertise, per se, got her BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (an early ‘70s classmate of David Byrne and influenced by his more occult musical forays) and her MFA in musicology at CalArts. She has been working intermittently on IMFR(ED) for over a decade, since she turned her home-recording studio into a working model of the sensory-deprivation, isolation chamber and tweaked its silence levels. In fact, in its test stages, it was developed and exhibited (under the same title) as an environmental art installation with a nod to Michael Asher (with whom she studied) and his early institutional critique actions, which Dan Graham has always said were as much about the acoustics of architecture and sound of an empty gallery as anything.

During her private development of IMFR(ED) and its flocked silence, and during its exhibition as a white-cube installation in Reykjavik in 2003, a particular unexplained euphoric effect became known. People isolated inside IMFR(ED) experience fleeting feelings of bliss. The ecstatic sensation is so brief it cannot be approached directly nor objectively. But, anecdotally, individuals consistently say that for an instant they no longer feared death.

For the first time in recent memory, the government took an affirmative and lively interest in art and trickle-down institutional critique. Traitee has since been employed under classified operations by DARPA and then NASA at JPL. Astronauts will undergo IMFR(ED) conditioning treatments before space travel.

- Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer