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ESA

The Practice of Art and Science - text ESA

In 2016 ESA joined the project as a new scientific partner. ESA—the European Space Agency—is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. ESA is an international organization with 22 Member States. ESA’s job is to draw up the European space program and carry it through. ESA’s programs are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System, and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite-based technologies and services, and to promote European industries. ESA also works closely with space organizations outside Europe.
www.esa.int

This residency at ESA offers artists an extraordinary opportunity to visit the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. ESTEC, the largest of ESA’s establishments, is the incubator of the European space effort, where most ESA projects are born and where they are guided through the various phases of development. There, artists can view ESA's environmental test centre for spacecraft and visit other laboratories specialised in systems engineering, components, and materials. During the residency, artists can get acquainted with all aspects of ESA's Space Science Programme, comprising a fleet of space telescopes performing astronomical observations across the electromagnetic spectrum and space probes exploring a variety of Solar System bodies. The residency also offers the unique chance to experience one-of-a-kind events, such as the arrival of the ExoMars mission at Mars, in October 2016, at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

The ESA Residency program is co-curated by Claudia Mignone and Karen O’Flaherty, and was initiated by Mark McCaughrean. "… Investigating our cosmic origins is a major theme in the Space Science Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA), which operates a fleet of missions that allow European scientists to be at the frontier of astrophysics, planetary science, solar and fundamental physics. It’s sometimes easy to forget, while caught up in the daily duties of scientific research, that space science tackles questions that spark curiosity at a deeper, more fundamentally human level. These questions concern the very essence of our existence on this planet—not as mere individuals but as part of a cosmic tale that started eons before us and that will continue long after we are gone. These questions do not pertain exclusively to science, but are central to many other domains of culture and research, and in particular to the arts. In recent years, in our role as communicators of ESA’s Space Science Programme to the broader public, we have met and interacted with a number of artists who had been inspired by ESA missions, by their results, and by the vision that brought them about. These artists wanted to learn more, to probe the scientific and technological processes that enable the spirit of enquiry to leave Earth’s gravitational pull to research the Universe from space. During these interactions, we appreciated the variety of perspectives that artists have on the scientific endeavour and were intrigued by how their curiosity is triggered by aspects that may differ from those pursued by scientists. These perspectives often provide refreshing insights into the science of the cosmos. So we were honoured when Ars Electronica invited ESA to join an exciting collaboration, researching the common ground between art and space science through an artistic residency, to be spent partly at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, and partly with the creative team at Futurelab in Austria. (…)
(Claudia Mignone, Karen O’Flaherty, and Mark McCaughrean, “When Art and Space Science meet“ in: RADICAL ATOMS and the alchemists of our time, Ars Electronica 2016, Hatje Cantz, p. 162)

(Source: The Practice of Art and Science, p. 44)