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close to the limits of the atmosphere, closer to whatever one imagined to be up beyond the seeable and hence the knowable. I began to read about the Apollo astronauts and the meticulous work of NASA in preparing astronauts and space craft to defy all the laws of physics which had held people under the thrall of gravity. I watched the earliest silent films which visualised space travel and the experience of weightlessness; a hundred years ago it was clear to these film makers that a journey into space would involve a toxic combination of science, colonisation and military strategy. Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) opens with a scene lifted straight from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) when The Baltimore Gun Club, a group dedicated to the design of weapons, creates a plan to send a rocket to the moon. The film also includes a phalanx of scantily clad girls escorting the rocket to its launch and the iconic scene in which the rocket lands on the face of the moon. In Edison’s A Trip to Mars (1910) the main character, a chemist, invents a powder with the power of reverse gravity. He dusts himself with the material and is propelled into outer space, legs kicking, to encounter a hostile Martian. The strange thing about space travel is how crude and rudimentary the filmed footage can seem, how similar to those early films. The radio broadcast from the tiny ship is riddled with static and disruptions to the narration from the astronauts and from ‘mission control’ which just appear as ‘…’ in the NASA transcripts. It’s suggestive of all the things that were not captured, the elements of the experience that remained unsayable, inexpressible. Michael Collins was left circling the moon alone and out of radio contact each time he passed its dark side as his two companions landed on the moon’s surface. He wrote: ‘It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life.’ How did it feel? And did my failure to understand the rudimentary physical laws of the universe in that high windowed classroom in which I was bored or lost or afloat in a sea of tranquillity, crisis, cold, cleverness, serenity, mean I could never ever go into space? Did it happen in that moment of detachment as I cast aside the cautious hopes of those who built that school? When all I seemed to do was feel. My ignorance of those lessons was just one of many moments that accumulated until my trajectory was set and earthbound: I would never go into space. When I began an artist residency at Metal Peterborough I was thinking about travelling to the moon constantly, obsessively. I travelled to Pontefract, home of the Space Lectures, to see Apollo astronauts speak. Part of the experience of attending the lectures included having your hand shaken by an astronaut as you had your photograph taken, speaking a few words before the next person stood up in your place. I can still feel the electric thrill that went through my whole body when I made physical contact, hand gripping hand fleetingly briefly, with an Apollo astronaut. It was a form of devotion; it wouldn’t be exaggerating to describe it as pilgrimage. After a lifetime of believing that I met every event in my life with stoic implacability I met a man who had walked on the moon and blushed like a teenager. The moment I walked into Peterborough Cathedral I was convinced that the people who had built it were trying to reach the heavens. The eye follows the lines of columns up to the vaulted ceiling as if stone could sigh out the desire for sanctuary in space. The idea of being lost but also finally finding yourself is implicit in the idea of such a journey. My residency was shared with the visual artist Bettina Furnée. Trained as a stone letter cutter, she understood the material forces at work in the engineering of this massive building. Her artistic practice also focused on the moon, but it was primarily on the effect of the moon upon earth, its orbital pathway and waxing and waning influence on tides and the environment. Like many visitors to the cathedral, we were strangers, lost in an alien environment and a long way from home. But we were not alone in this. Many people visit the place purely because it is located next to the region’s only emergency passport office. And so, by definition, they are on a journey somewhere else. Not only this, but Peterborough is a place of migration, with one of the fastest growing populations in the country. Numberless waves of people from around the world have arrived here from distant places and stayed briefly in the shadows of this huge building. 21
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During the artist residency, I read aloud extracts from the radio transmissions of Apollo astronauts inside the cathedral; my voice barely permeated its enormity. I then transposed the recording onto the breaks and stutters of the brittle radio transmissions sent from the Apollo space craft back to earth. I wanted my voice to sound like an astronaut’s, I wanted it to be projected far away, blasted into oblivion and distorted as a result of the journey. The first piece of work I made with Bettina, however, was firmly rooted in the domestic. We interviewed artists about what they imagined a journey to the moon would be like. The descriptions were set to a film of Bettina’s living room light, a replica of the moon designed by Buzz Aldrin and produced by the high street interiors company, Habitat. She filmed it teetering on her armchair, creating the wobbling effect of a silent film’s vision of a spaceship steadily approaching the moon and leaving the earth behind. The people who could actually fill the cathedral space were, of course, the choristers, the candlelit choir, singing Evensong in the centre of the dark cathedral, their voices pushing outwards, further and further. Music projecting out of the body towards the vaulted ceiling then reverberating back towards them. It was as if the chapel was an instrument, in harmony with their bodies, their lungs, diaphragms, mouths, all unified in the construction of a sound that could reach beyond the darkness. And the organ. Of course, the organ, which blasted through the building. If anything could reflect the force of a lift off, which people felt reverberating in the ground for miles and miles from the launch site, it was the organ. The organ, however, was the wrong pitch. Built in the nineteenth century, when clocks told different times across the country, before the arrival of railways and the need for coherence, this organ had a pitch which differed from other organs. Now, of course, it was expected that music around the world should be at the same pitch: where the note A above middle C vibrates 440 times a second (440 Hz). For years Peterborough pitch had been synonymous with the place; it meant that visiting musicians and singers couldn’t sing alongside the organ. Finally, the cathedral had bowed to the inevitable and fundraised for the vastly expensive work. Now every one of the 22 5,286 pipes was being sent away to be lengthened so that the vibrations they generated were all altered by half a semi-tone. This created an opportunity for us; when the organ was finally reconstructed, we thought, that would be a chance to make some noise. Not everyone would agree that nearly half a million pounds is a wise use of resources for a cathedral that came close to bankruptcy during the course of the project. Nevertheless, the funds were raised for the scheme and the pipes were sent to Durham to be altered. Meanwhile, we began to plan for their return and the painstaking reconstruction of that vast machine. Bettina and I began to devise a project that might reflect the scale and intensity of the original Apollo launches and also the unspoken, unspeakable hopes and dreams and aspirations it carried with it. The euphoric experience of witnessing the first steps into space had a counter reality - the landing was a function of military propaganda. This was another reason why the personnel selected to fly the missions were so compromised in their ability to talk about the experience. At the same time as they carried the hopes of many, they were also carrying tactical knowledge, and information which formed the basis of an enduring and relentless Cold War, its tendrils still reaching into the sunlit winter morning when I stood at the wooden desk looking at a spiral of metal and wondered about the shape of sound. Sound requires a transmitting medium to propagate in, as evidenced by the Slinky experiment. However, once in space, that medium is lost. Space is a vacuum and sound cannot travel. But radio waves can travel through a vacuum which is why the Apollo missions were able to communicate between the earth and the lunar spacecrafts. Once the astronauts were outside the ship, radio became not only the medium to communicate with earth but also the only way of speaking with each other. Science fiction has frequently suggested that for astronauts to touch their helmet against another astronaut’s helmet would permit sound to transmit through their contact and create a bridge between them. It is a conceit grounded in physics; in the absence of a conductor, the body and the helmet become the means of transmitting and registering sound from one person to another. There is an implied intimacy in such

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close to the limits of the atmosphere, closer to whatever one imagined to be up beyond the seeable and hence the knowable. I began to read about the Apollo astronauts and the meticulous work of NASA in preparing astronauts and space craft to defy all the laws of physics which had held people under the thrall of gravity. I watched the earliest silent films which visualised space travel and the experience of weightlessness; a hundred years ago it was clear to these film makers that a journey into space would involve a toxic combination of science, colonisation and military strategy. Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) opens with a scene lifted straight from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) when The Baltimore Gun Club, a group dedicated to the design of weapons, creates a plan to send a rocket to the moon. The film also includes a phalanx of scantily clad girls escorting the rocket to its launch and the iconic scene in which the rocket lands on the face of the moon. In Edison’s A Trip to Mars (1910) the main character, a chemist, invents a powder with the power of reverse gravity. He dusts himself with the material and is propelled into outer space, legs kicking, to encounter a hostile Martian.

The strange thing about space travel is how crude and rudimentary the filmed footage can seem, how similar to those early films. The radio broadcast from the tiny ship is riddled with static and disruptions to the narration from the astronauts and from ‘mission control’ which just appear as ‘…’ in the NASA transcripts. It’s suggestive of all the things that were not captured, the elements of the experience that remained unsayable, inexpressible. Michael Collins was left circling the moon alone and out of radio contact each time he passed its dark side as his two companions landed on the moon’s surface. He wrote: ‘It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life.’ How did it feel? And did my failure to understand the rudimentary physical laws of the universe in that high windowed classroom in which I was bored or lost or afloat in a sea of tranquillity, crisis, cold, cleverness, serenity, mean I could never ever go into space? Did it happen in that moment of detachment as I cast aside the cautious hopes of those who built that school?

When all I seemed to do was feel. My ignorance of those lessons was just one of many moments that accumulated until my trajectory was set and earthbound: I would never go into space.

When I began an artist residency at Metal Peterborough I was thinking about travelling to the moon constantly, obsessively. I travelled to Pontefract, home of the Space Lectures, to see Apollo astronauts speak. Part of the experience of attending the lectures included having your hand shaken by an astronaut as you had your photograph taken, speaking a few words before the next person stood up in your place. I can still feel the electric thrill that went through my whole body when I made physical contact, hand gripping hand fleetingly briefly, with an Apollo astronaut. It was a form of devotion; it wouldn’t be exaggerating to describe it as pilgrimage. After a lifetime of believing that I met every event in my life with stoic implacability I met a man who had walked on the moon and blushed like a teenager.

The moment I walked into Peterborough Cathedral I was convinced that the people who had built it were trying to reach the heavens. The eye follows the lines of columns up to the vaulted ceiling as if stone could sigh out the desire for sanctuary in space. The idea of being lost but also finally finding yourself is implicit in the idea of such a journey. My residency was shared with the visual artist Bettina Furnée. Trained as a stone letter cutter, she understood the material forces at work in the engineering of this massive building. Her artistic practice also focused on the moon, but it was primarily on the effect of the moon upon earth, its orbital pathway and waxing and waning influence on tides and the environment.

Like many visitors to the cathedral, we were strangers, lost in an alien environment and a long way from home. But we were not alone in this. Many people visit the place purely because it is located next to the region’s only emergency passport office. And so, by definition, they are on a journey somewhere else. Not only this, but Peterborough is a place of migration, with one of the fastest growing populations in the country. Numberless waves of people from around the world have arrived here from distant places and stayed briefly in the shadows of this huge building.

21

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