The Moon Goose Analogue
Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE)
An analogue is a rehearsal for living in space. At various remote facilities around the world astronauts are practising for the phsychological challenges humans can face living away from earth. Meyer-Brandis` remote analogue habitat simulates the conditions of the Moon and will be accessed and operated from Meyer-Brandis’s control room installation within the gallery, where instructional videos, photographs and vitrines of the geese’s egg shells and footprints are displayed.
The viewer can see and interact with the geese in the control room in real time while the artist encourages you to explore the margins of reality, in that liminal space where scientific data becomes elegiac data.
The Moon Goose Analogue
‘The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar migration Bird Facility’ was inspired by the book ‘The Man in the Moone’ written by F. Godwin (1603), in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’.
Almost four hundred years later Agnes Meyer Brandis raised eleven moon geese from birth in Pollinaria (IT). The geese were named after the astronauts Neil, Svetlana, Gozales, Valentina, Friede, Juri, Buzz, Kaguya-Anoushheh, Irena, Rakesh and Konstantin-Hermann.
Meyer-Brandis taught the geese to fly, took the geese on expeditions and housed them in a remote Moon analogue habitat that simulates the conditions of the moon. For this exhibition the artist developed a control room in which the audience can interact with the documented materials of this poetic experiment. The exhibition displays instructional videos, photographs and vitrines of the geese’s eggshells and footprints.
The art work is a poetic-scientific investigation weaving together science and art, fact, imagination, storytelling, myth, past, present and future.
Moon Goose Analogue – Installation
Agnes Meyer–Brandis, 2012/16
“THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE: Lunar Migration Bird Facility” by Agnes Meyer–Brandis
was commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and FACT, in partnership with Pollinaria and in coproduction by Z33.
„The Moon Goose Colony, P1“ is a Pollinaria project by Agnes Meyer–Brandis.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis, born 1973 in Aachen, Germany, studied mineralogy for a year, then transfered to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. She comes from a background of both sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide and awarded, is at the experimental edge of art and science, exploring the zone between fact and fiction.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis is the founder of the “Forschungsfloss FFUR / Research Raft for Subterranean Reefology“, a small institute whose chief aim is to explore and confirm subterranean phenomena and unknown lifeforms. Since 2007 her focus of investigation moved into higher altitude with their connected realities.
She realized an artistic experiment in weightlessness in cooperation with the German Space Agency DLR. In 2011 she started to breed Moon Geese in Italy. For a more detailed description of her work, please go to her homepage: www.ffur.de
