The first installation and evaluation of the MGE experiment was presented at KIASMA Mediathec in the scope of the exhibition: "Expedition to the Total Eclipse"
date: 6. March - 6. June 2009
location: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma | Finnish National Gallery, Finnland
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media installation
Wooden structure, slides, video, sound, chair and weather station as well as 13 invisible moon geese.
The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from the book The Man in the Moone, written by the english bishop Francis Godwin in 1603. Godwin was the first person ever to describe weightlessness – long before Newton’s theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by gansas birds, more commonly known as geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon. The artist equips the space expedition on a sand island in the Siberian river Ob and observes the effect of the total eclipse of the Sun on the behaviour of the moon geese.
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[...] I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, [...]
Francis Godwin (1603), The Man in the Moone
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MGE Installation - V-Board detail, drawing AMB
videostill, MGE "The Travel to the Moon", HD, 7:07 min. in cooperation with astronomers Agrupación Astronómica de Sabadell (Spain)
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