Space Junk
Description
Space junk is a video and sound installation that continues out-of-sync situationist inspired practice of making work that starts with performative encounters in public places. The work dwells textually, aurally and visually on the paradoxes and odd juxtapositions of modernity. In particular, the conceptual and aesthetic residues of the jet age and space race in the ancient landscape of colonised and colonising Australia.
Well-worn Australian cinematic type images of desolate roads against furnace red skies with road trains thundering down them juxtapose silent shots of scrubby desert wildflowers as a voice narrates the story of the artists' road trip and their spare poetic observations. Scenes of various tourist sites in Woomera: a park containing old rockets sculpturally displayed; public buildings; close-ups of bowling pins being knocked down in the town's bowling alley display the aesthetic residues of the Space age: the surprising junk left over and what becomes of it.
The soundscape features rhythmic ambiguous metallic sounds, sounding sometimes like the clatter of a typewriter, at other times the scraping sound of metal against a metal interspersed with the crunch of footsteps walking over salty earth, at other times quiet with spare voice over.
Gillian Fuller
Well-worn Australian cinematic type images of desolate roads against furnace red skies with road trains thundering down them juxtapose silent shots of scrubby desert wildflowers as a voice narrates the story of the artists' road trip and their spare poetic observations. Scenes of various tourist sites in Woomera: a park containing old rockets sculpturally displayed; public buildings; close-ups of bowling pins being knocked down in the town's bowling alley display the aesthetic residues of the Space age: the surprising junk left over and what becomes of it.
The soundscape features rhythmic ambiguous metallic sounds, sounding sometimes like the clatter of a typewriter, at other times the scraping sound of metal against a metal interspersed with the crunch of footsteps walking over salty earth, at other times quiet with spare voice over.
Gillian Fuller
Artist Statement
In 2006 we took a roadtrip to Woomera in South Australia, wanting to see the fabled rocket-testing, weapons testing site we were surprised at what we found. Woomera the traditional country of the Kokatha people is now owned by the Defence Department. It's essentially a company town, rather than a country town. Woomera is a place that occupies a singular and contradictory position in the Australian cultural landscape. It is a place of actual and imaginary space junk, an ageing Rocket Park and a town with a shrinking population. It was once the centre of Australia's defence program - testing rockets and sending Australia's first satellite into orbit. 4000-7000 people lived there. Today there is about 200 people living in a purpose-built town surrounded by the Woomera Prohibited Area. In many ways it exemplifies modernity's contradictions and paradoxes.
Artists' description on Vimeo.
In 2006 we took a roadtrip to Woomera in South Australia, wanting to see the fabled rocket-testing, weapons testing site we were surprised at what we found. Woomera the traditional country of the Kokatha people is now owned by the Defence Department. It's essentially a company town, rather than a country town. Woomera is a place that occupies a singular and contradictory position in the Australian cultural landscape. It is a place of actual and imaginary space junk, an ageing Rocket Park and a town with a shrinking population. It was once the centre of Australia's defence program - testing rockets and sending Australia's first satellite into orbit. 4000-7000 people lived there. Today there is about 200 people living in a purpose-built town surrounded by the Woomera Prohibited Area. In many ways it exemplifies modernity's contradictions and paradoxes.
Artists' description on Vimeo.
Creator
Out-of-sync
Miranda, Maria
Neumark, Norie
Date
2006
Rights
Copyright Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda. The copyright of images posted on the ADELTA Website belongs to third parties and is included on this website by permission from copyright holders. Apart from any use permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 (including fair dealing) the images may not be downloaded, adapted, remixed, printed, emailed, stored in a cache or otherwise reproduced without the written permission from the copyright holder.
Platform
Video installation
Work URL
Citation
Out-of-sync, Miranda, Maria, and Neumark, Norie, “Space Junk,” ADELTA, accessed November 21, 2024, https://adelta.westernsydney.edu.au/items/show/153.