Last weekend found me in my old home town, Brighton. It’s the Brighton Digital Festival this month, and as part of that, Shrinking Space, in collaboration with Little Atoms and the European Space Agency, have put on a fantastic audio installation called “Mind’s Eye” at the old fruit and veg market building on Circus Street. I went to check it out with my Mum last Saturday.
The building
Mind’s Eye is an attempt “to explore and understand the Solar System through the voices of those most familiar with it”. Though it is only five minutes’ walk from the seafront, most Brightonians will only know Circus Street through visits to the infamous all night “Market Diner” café opposite. Shrinking Space productions have transformed the vast and dilapidated market building into an audiosphere representing the entire solar system. When you enter, you are given headphones and a ready-tuned iPod radio. Then, as you drift around the building, you are pulled into the orbit of the various interviews being broadcast in different parts of it, each with a scientist or space explorer whose knowledge of the planet or star they are describing often represents a lifetime’s work. The effect is bewitching, like floating through space itself, with only the occasional transmission back to earth for company.
One happy listener
Little Atoms’ Neil Denny, heir to Melvyn Bragg, conducted the interviews. The first of three Little Atoms shows dedicated to the project was broadcast last week on London’s Resonance 104.4FM, and is available here. It features interviews with Gerhard Schwehm, Mission Manager for the Rosetta comet chaser, Dr Caitriona Jackman on the Cassini mission to Saturn and Dr Peter Grindrod on Mars. There will be a second instalment this week (with Dr Katherine Joy on the Moon, and Sandra Cauffman of the MAVEN project, whose spacecraft successfully entered Mars’s orbit yesterday). The final instalment next week features an unforgettable interview with former Space Shuttle astronaut Gerhard Thiele, as well as my Mum’s favourite from the show, Dr Helen Mason on the Sun.
If you can make it down to the installation itself, I would recommend you do so. It runs this Friday 26th September, 3:30pm-6pm, and Saturday and Sunday 27th and 28th, 10am-6pm. More info here.
The Barefoot Technologist 