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Korean Artist's Intentionally Useless Satellite To Launch This December
An anonymous reader quotes the introduction to Inhabit's article on the upcoming launch of an art project cum satellite intended to be as different as possible from conventional space hardware: "South Korean artist Song Hojun has created his own DIY satellite from scratch – and he's planning to launch it into space this coming December. Song created the satellite from assorted junk he found in back-alley electronics stores in his home town of Seoul, and over the course of six years he has finally managed to complete his space-bound project. Song's satellite cost just over $400 to make, however the cost of launching it to space is going to be a lot, lot more – over $100,000."
Seriously, we don't need more space junk. This "artist" is a griefer.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Isn't this the equivalent of putting together a non-running car out of scrap and then pushing it into the middle of the interstate and calling it 'art'?
Littering near earth orbit as a side effect of doing something useful is problematic. Littering near earth orbit intentionally and for no purpose is pretty antisocial.
Apparently people will be able to upload messages to be flashed in Morse code by LEDs on the satellite. So it actually does do something. I'm skeptical about how easy it will be to see the LEDs from Earth, though.
It is certainly important to let and fund anyone who wants to call their self an "artist" to put junk into orbit. And far better to let this jerk, I mean artist, use the funds and the launch space to feel good about himself than to actually put micro-sats or other useful technology into space. After all, they are only designed and built by mere scientists, not artists.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Why not take an empty canvas and put it on the wall? Or drive around for half a day collecting random crap, then toss it all in a public square - call it a sculpture and a 'statement'.
Funny
In all seriousness, there really should be a different word for these pomo conceptual people. Art has to have _some_ beauty in it, doesn't it? It _has_ to require talent beyond the everyday, doesn't it?
We should be able to expand art beyond renaissance-era landscapes and portraits using oil-on-canvas without debasing the term 'art' to cover everything. It make the term useless, just like some people are doing to hacking: ever since everything requiring the smallest modicum of... time? became hacking, every douchebag with time on his hands has felt welcome at HOPE, but at the same time a unique group has been diluted to nothing: something has been lost.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Unfortunately, we don't have any weapons that would make it simply not exist, only ones that would break it into lots of small, harder to deal with pieces. Better to target the "artist".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I am really, really trying to find some kind of justification for this "art" project and I'm coming up with bupkis.
OK... It does nothing scientific. But it does nothing artistic either.
It's about as artistic as painting a rock and dumping in the Marianas Trench.
For something to be considered art, it has to be able to communicate to other humans a message beyond just its own physical existence.
This satellite is supposed to send messages transmitted to it by blinking its LEDs and "People will be able to see the blinking lights with the naked eye or through a telescope".
Visible from the Earth's surface. With naked eye. LEDs. A 10x10x10 cm cube. Hanging in low Earth orbit. 600-2000 km from the surface. Right.
I can't really be bothered to look it up, but something tells me that you can't really see a 10 cm cube, 600-2000 km away, with an amateur telescope.
Besides, shouldn't Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) "ground" this project?
Also, WTF is "Science is Fantasy" supposed to mean?
That science is unattainable and/or imaginary? Not real? With no real function or application?
Just dumping that "is" and it would make SOME sense. Or reversing the order of words in the sentence.
This... this is just half-thought through crap.
All I see here is rich, privileged parents, buying their rich, privileged, spoiled kid his 15 minutes of fame since he can't get there with his own effort and talent.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have an even better art project. Find some POS art project that is a total waste of time and money, steal it, and smash it to pieces as performance art before it gets off the ground. Then I'll post the footage on youtube and let viewers try to decide what message I was trying to convey in my performance.
Seriously, this kind of crap is why I have much disdain for avant-garde, modern, and 'contemporary' art. In general, most of these types of artists tend to be on the far left of the political spectrum (which is ok, but...), they denounce poverty, pollution, and destruction of our environment. But how much destruction is from paint chemicals leaking into ground water? How many starving or improvrished people could be rescued from the grants paid to these "inspiring" artists? How many HFH homes could have been built with the labor and talent of our academic and intellectual leaders of the art world? I don't want to deny them their fun, and I don't know the political views of this artist, but I think we have all seen what I have described.
As non-artists, non-academics, and non-elites we have been conditioned to believe that we just don't have the intellectual capacity to understand the significance and importance of their great work. All told, most of the "new" art movements from the past 150 years have been a byproduct of delusional, paranoid schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. When crazy people connect with other crazy people, finding someone with the same delusions reinforces their belief that they do not have a mental illness but some profound insight into the nature of the Universe. So we have today an oligarchy of mentally ill cultural elites to whom the rest of the masses aim to aspire to in their aesthetic endeavors, not much unlike the inbred aristocracy that was convinced that they were owed special status in life due to their pedigree. Fortunately a few revolutions (France, America) eventually forced the aristocrats to take a back seat to productive citizens who now set their own destiny, banishing royal life to the back pages of gossip tabloids, somewhere behind part-cow/part-alien boy and the ghost of Michael Jackson. It would be nice one day to see mainstream non-art academics, financiers and art endowments wake up to a revolution of their own to refer these jokers to a different "institution".
Great, just what we need, another piece of junk orbiting the planet and causing a hazard to other space missions.
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