Loving the Alien

Laura Emrick's Portrait of an Alien (1999) has four thin rings of fluorescent green Perspex that are balanced vertically, edge to edge, and teeter at slight angles to each other. Recalling an old fashioned, low-tech, science fiction imagination (Dr Who as opposed to The Matrix), Portrait of an Alien seems guaranteed to raise a smile; yet, perhaps because it conjures up outmoded representations of the future, it also seems faintly sad. This is typical of Emrick's installation Proposal for the First Museum of Mars (1999), the appeal of which is not solely restricted to the joys of fluorescent Perspex. The works provoke reflections on the imagination of the future, a little darker than their cheerful surfaces might initially suggest.

Seated under acrylic domes, Emrick's three Crystalline Biospheres (1999) are kitschily lush home-made Martian landscapes comprised of crystal growing kits, bits of plastic, Lego and, in one case, a collectible Hot Wheels toy of the Sojourner Mars probe. The biospheres might belong to an imagined history of terraforming - a process by which the planet may become more Earth-like and habitable through pumping benign gases into the Martian atmosphere (and other high-tech tricks). They might also represent a somewhat comical, miniaturised endpoint of the Earthworks of artists like Smithson and Heizer (what would they have done with a whole planet?). While these jewel-like encrustations reveal a fascination with the idea of Martian exploration and the technological possibility of terraforming, in the end they are reminiscent of nothing so much as the domed greenhouse carrying the last of a blasted Earth's flora, in which Bruce Dern, as a terminally cranky botanist, drifted into space in the early eco-conscious science fiction film Silent Running (1971). Nearby Emrick's biospheres is a set of fluorescent shelves supporting hanging plants. It is titled Greenhouse Effect (1999), which might refer to the beneficial effects of an imaginary terraforming of Mars, but, in its presentation of homely plants as exotic specimens, refers also to the disastrous results of the terraforming already underway on this planet. Emrick intimates the galactic hubris of terraforming - okay, we've wrecked one planet, but there are others - and the way that science fiction often binds apocalypse and nostalgia together in the fantasy of a clean slate, a new start. Space is often the final frontier because home is uninhabitable; the frontier is nonetheless an old-fashioned place where we know how to behave.

This nostalgic element of imagining of the future is evident in the way Emrick's work evokes childhood. Cubic Highrise 1-11 (1999), a faux-architectural model of eleven stacked, multi-coloured Perspex cubes, replays the once futuristic fantasies of Modernism as an elaborate child's game. Martian Test Drive (1999) is a cluster of reddish brown rocks, lit from behind by fluorescent lights, over which stumbles a remote-controlled toy Sojourner Mars rover. (With a wink to Minimalist fabrication, Emrick's Mars rocks were acquired by faxing pictures of Mars to a quarry and asking them to match them; the quarry delivered.) The toy is not that much smaller than the actual Sojourner, which is about the size of a skateboard and provoked a scientific/PR crisis when it got stuck against a real rock on Mars. In The Terraformation of Mars (1999) more stones are placed like samples at the foot of a small, scientific exhibition-style panel carrying a Martian landscape photograph taken by Sojourner. These works, like the biospheres, evoke a childlike (conventionally boyish, though perhaps Emrick contests this) glee for an adventurous future, that is associated with so-called 'hard', technologically-driven science fiction (think of Robert Heinlein's cold war techno-fables, or more recently, Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy envisioning, exactly, the terraforming of Mars).

It was an oddly comforting childhood fantasy that one could have adventures in faraway galaxies; comforting because those galaxies and their planets were subject to no rules but your own, cobbled together out of whatever genre conventions had lodged in your head. It is a fantasy that outlives childhood - perhaps unfortunately, as Emrick's toys imply. The founding declaration of the Mars Society (an organisation dedicated to the cause of Martian exploration, whose members include a number of scientists and sci-fi writers such as Robinson) proclaims that 'We' must go to Mars. The reasons for this are enumerated as being for the expansion of knowledge about Mars and the Earth (the ecological pitch); for the challenge and the opportunity (what, multi-global capitalism?); for the young and our humanity ('We are life's messengers' sounds like humanism turned species-ist - it must be us, not the Alpha Centaurians); and, of course, for the future (see www.marssociety.org for your local chapter). It's one thing for a nine-year old boy to make another planet a free space for the imagination; it's another, backward-looking thing, for adults, lobbying for more NASA funding, to say that we'll make Mars into what we'd have liked Earth to be. Ray Bradbury described this scenario in his folksy Martian Chronicles of the late 40s and early 50s: a wholesome, middle-class family flees a self-destructing Earth for Mars; having arrived, they look at their own reflections in a pool of (imaginary) water and encounter 'the Martians'.

The future is a tricky proposition, as Emrick's attempt to remember it in advance makes clear. One work, the eponymously titled Proposal for the First Museum of Mars (1999), collects together miniature versions of elements from the whole installation on a Perspex table-top covered in ultra-suede. There are exhibition divider-panels displaying photographs of Mars, miniature Mars rocks, a tiny Portrait of an Alien and a collection of other green plastic objects, a chunky ring, a lighter, a toy car, a water pistol, etc. This provides a gleaming summary of the entire installation, in which the imagined history of Mars is largely given in terms of cheap, possibly second-hand commodities. (Elsewhere, in Greetings to Extraterrestrials, 1998, a green iMac on a Perspex desk shows images of Mars intercut with advertising and PR, with an 'alien' voiceover.) Among the randomly scaled objects in this tableau, the water pistol might be a space age weapon, but it also stands up as if it were a futuristic skyscraper, whereas the ring might be a Martian artifact, an alien monument, or some explorer's lucky charm. Here the representation of the future is restricted to available and, in some cases, outmoded commodities. Recalling Marcel Broodthaers' borrowed objects and witty analyses of the logic of their organisation, the thematics of Emerick's collection are largely reduced to the choice of material - a kind of interplanetary pseudo-morphology.

The effect of the miniature version of Proposal... is to bring to a head the unexpected juxtaposition of two familiar sensations. Firstly, the childlike enthusiasm for the material. All that fluorescent Perspex is a lot of fun: you want to play with it, and this recalls a sense of wonder about the future, however old-fashioned, or however quickly that sense becomes fused with nostalgia. Secondly, the melancholy sophistication of critique. Emrick's commodities (from iMac to collectible Hot Wheels) slyly envisage Mars as all too bound to Earth. Her art historical recyclings - from fluorescence itself, in all its forms, to Earthworks, to Pop and institutional critique - similarly provide a knowing counterweight to any too-enthusiastic imagining of the future as a fresh start.

Lars Bang Larsen on the N55 Spaceframe

Standing at the foot of the N55 Spaceframe while holidaymakers poke cameras at what looks like a NASA invention that's just dropped from the Moon onto the Copenhagen harbour front, you wonder what on earth has driven the four members of the artist's group N55 in this direction. Developed in collaboration with architect Erling Sørvin, the Spaceframe is the result of the group's endeavours to create environments with a social purpose. Their artistic practice has, over the last years, also yielded a range of functional objects with a political twist. In July, the completed version of Spaceframe was employed as a temporary platform for concerts, exhibitions and freeform summer activities.

N55's Spaceframe could be described as a DIY house, but the materiality and morphology of the shiny, scaly stainless steel pod amalgamates the utilitarian with the fantastic. It represents the Modernist cube and the Utopian sphere, as much as the architectural mongrels of the nearby Christiania District. Had it lain in pastures green it might have risked misinterpretation as some new age Walden, a starry-eyed, amorphous vision. As it is, the living unit is situated on a dock by the old navy base, next to a big, rusty crane. Across the seaward approach to city, plied by hydrofoils to Sweden and massive cruise liners, there are perfect sunsets over the spires and domes of the old city and the bland glass and concrete headquarters of the global conglomerates. The site the Spaceframe occupies is thus divided in terms of the population it includes, the buildings it locates and the activities it frames, urban and unstable. It is not without irony that permission to build the Spaceframe at this location was given by the landlord and next door neighbour, Copenhagen School of Architecture. Incorporating a critique of architecture's perpetuation of traditional ideas about housing, N55's Spaceframe is an odd parasite upon urban space, a different breed of social determinant and role maker.

The unfamiliar appearance of the Spaceframe is in keeping with its radical adaptability, conceived as a housing solution independent of local styles. Like other examples of alternative, 'universal' notions of housing - from the products of Buckminster Fuller to those of Matti Suuronen - the Spaceframe looks like it would be as comfortable in the suburbs as in a rain forest (though it doesn't exactly beg for a garden gnome or an elephant door mat placed by the entrance). Configured with harmonious formal self-sufficiency as a truncated tetrahedron, it has no cast foundations, no right angles and no window frames. The door is a sort of docking hatch, and the whole construction is flatly symmetrical - as if the entire structure could be knocked on its side and still function. The primitive, crystalline geometry is independent of scale (Spaceframe could vary in size and still convey the same sensibility) and hints at the flexible logic of its construction, suggesting the possibility of other manifestations of this type of geometric architecture could multiply.

Practically speaking this is not unimaginable. A version of the Spaceframe could be constructed in a couple of weeks 'by anybody', N55 promises, using small, lightweight components that can be easily manufactured and reassembled without damage. For the cost of an average car, the Spaceframe can be assembled by hand without the use of cranes or other heavy tools. It has no need for exterior maintenance and has the potential for zero energy consumption - heating being provided by proper insulation, sunlight, cooking and the physical activity of its occupants. Due to its experimental state, the Spaceframe is still subject to adjustments when subjected to the rigours of everyday life, but these seem to be few and easily surmountable when considered in relation to the initial task of re-inventing the house.

Unlike Georges Perec, who thought that the idea of triangular space was 'as spectacular as it is gratuitous', there is a good reason for the basic shape of the Spaceframe, which recurs in N55's bed, table, chair and other objects. Its design is based on the principle of the octet truss, an extendable, modifiable structure that obtains the greatest strength with the minimum of materials (in this case thin, bent steel struts). The sculptural formulations of the octet truss assume serene, abstract qualities in the repetition and small scale differentiation of elements: in the play of light on the convex accents of each outside plate; in the meandering patterns of the windows; and in the irregularities brought about by slight variations in colouring of the floor plates and the interior wall covering. If you don't quite know what to make of the Spaceframe from the outside, the inside doesn't offer much spatial familiarity either. The weightlessness you feel in the pyramidal interior is due partly to the confounding of our own expectations of space - that it should be rectangular and that the ground plane will be repeated as a ceiling a couple of feet above our heads, supported by fixed, even walls that don't allow your decisions to become an active part of the architecture.

N55's functional art objects were put to use in the Spaceframe. The modular interior offers elementary accommodation for eating, sleeping and defecating. Each item is provided with a manual which explains its manufacturing process down to the last screw. The accumulated technologies of the Spaceframe extend a re-visioning of the way we usually go about things, a critique of the present rather than faith in the future. N55 annex solutions which they believe to be workable and enrol them in the environment of their practice. Sometimes they work from an existing starting point, but often their solutions to the problems of basic needs are quite unlike anything you may see elsewhere. The manuals indicate that the process is participatory - it can be carried out at home without the aid of the artists. In effect, the manuals outline a constructive rationality upon which you can engage in a social fantasy.

If N55's project is a utopian one, it can be said to be a derivation of Utopia in its original literary sense - the first culturally legitimated and conventionally accepted form of social criticism. The philosopher Leonidas Donskis noted that: 'The safest way for utopian writers to avoid misunderstanding and live in safety was to use fictional tricks. This contributed to a fundamental change in the way stories were told, by introducing the seemingly naïve narrator who finds everything under the firmament surprising, wonderful or amazing'. Faced with the way N55's gadgets respond to the activities around them, the viewer feels like a utopian narrator on a fascinating journey that leads to new and subversive discoveries. N55's functional art objects, the Spaceframe included, are thus not about creating a range of new objects with a radically different functionality, but are the result of deliberate competition with received ideas, and about placement of responsibility in opposition to power-based types of behaviour.

Until its erection, the Spaceframe existed as seemly, economical stacks of triangular plaster, birch and steel plates in N55's apartment - which is how it might end up again after its trial period is over. Alternatively, a spot may be found for it somewhere in Copenhagen, where it will then live on as a space for living and exhibiting. Either option seems viable. After all, unlike the world's prestige museums and millennium domes, examples of current monumentalist extensions of the concept of the house, N55's Spaceframe also works as a cloud of conjecture - as art and reality.