Painting the New Worlds of Space

Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.

Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.

But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.

Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.

“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…

Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.

Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.

“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.

Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.

Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.

The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.

Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.

The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14

The Moon-a-Mucks Aboard Spaceship Moon

So, if it has been established (!) that the moon is indeed a giant spaceship, who are the intelligences behind it? What are the entities that hollowed it out using huge steampunk sounding engines and rendered the surface a mess of lava and slag? What is their purpose?

Looking at all the evidence for Spaceship Moon, I can venture a few theories of my own.

The moon was once a beautiful, fertile world that orbited the star Epsilon Eridani 11 light years away. However, the action of a passing mini black hole ejected the world from that stellar system, and catapulted the Moon across the local region of space in the direction of the sun. As soon as the sun got too far away, all life died, including the sentient inhabitants who were much fond of gardening and other agricultural pursuits.

When it had nearly reached the heliopause, a group of wandering bio-mechanical life forms encountered the dead, lonely world, and were greatly saddened. Luckily they specialised in planetary renovations, so having claimed salvage rights, they endeavoured to recover the moon's lost beauty, evidence of which had been left by the former inhabitants.

As had been theorized, these tall, 8 tentacled creatures, resembling a semi-metallic, upright squid, used their vast technological advances to hollow out the moon, install living quarters for themselves, and take up vast amounts of space with an inertial gyroscope drive, and terraforming equipment to green the Moon once again.

They wept, so they did, at the devastation they caused to get their engines of creation in place - their had still been a certain sterile beauty to the Moon - but remembered that given time the Moon would be a treasure of the heavens again, and time was something these near immortal life forms had in abundance.

So they set a course for the nearerst habitable looking solar system, our sun. It took a while for their inertial propulsion system to bring the colossal mass of the Moon into the Earth's sphere of influence. But once they had done so, contrary to geological evidence a mere 10,000 years ago, they began to work. The Quartz moonflowers began to grow.

Moonflowers are two metre tall sunflower like pseudo-plant designed to provide oxygen, through a complex light driven reaction with the quartz crystal matrix. But they need help, and this is where the moon-a-mucks come in.

Moon-a-mucks are a metre long, soft grey creatures, with a beak like a platypus only in a trumpet, or horn shape. They have bright green eyes, and don't need to breathe, existing as they do on joy absorbed from the eleventh dimension. When a moon-a-muck is fed with joy, its grey fur fluffs up, and it begins to sing a song in the electro magnetic spectrum that radiates out everywhere in the universe...so when you smile on a sunny day, that is caused by the moon-a-mucks song, the song of a creature only I suspect exists on our narrow minded little world.

But the moon-a-mucks prime function is to sing to the moon flowers in the sub-surface growing rooms. Their songs cause the quartz crystal structure to resonate like someone rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger, and as it does so it stretches, before snapping back in place with a melodic molecular shattering, releasing oxygen from the Sio4 structure.

As the oxygen is released, the moon-a-mucks collect it with their lunar-flippers into a special feldspar container on their backs before carrying it deeper underground on their moon-a-muck railways to deposit in caves.

We don't see this, how can we? When every time we send a probe or lander, the tentacled moon-masters gather up their singing flocks of moon-a-mucks and herd them to underground barns where they won't be found or heard...they tell them to be very quiet and bribe them with moon truffles.

The purpose of all this is to one day flood the lunar surface with oxygen, held in place by gravity generators so it doesn't leak out into space, and then commence the Greening of the Moon.

One day, the moon will rise, and we will find it as green as an emerald. And the tentacled moon masters and the moon-a-mucks will be waiting, for those they deem worthy...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.03.14

Spaceship Moon

I have to admit, with a really shameful and apologetic face, that I find UFO culture to be endlessly fascinating. I have a number of books on the subject, some of them of the classic “The Unexplained” magazine reports collected in a single volume, another with some wonderful illustrations of Nordic blonde spacemen apparently dressed as fish. And account of the classic sexual encounter between a Brazilian called Vilas-Boas (not the football manager) and a spacewoman with blood red pubic hair.

Another is a rather more sober volume with a black cover illustrated with the so called Washington Invasion photos of definitely-not flying saucers giving the Capitol a buzz in the 50s. Within it, are some rather strange theories about the moon.

Now let me say straightaway that the UFO stuff is all utter rubbish, and most of the reports a four year old with a reasonable sense of scepticism could see through. I find them interesting as a cultural document of their times, and the deep seated sub and supra conscious fears of folk through the various tumults of the nuclear age. And one idea that a few people had on the go was that the moon was some kind of spaceship, expounded upon in the sober black book.

We don't really know how the moon came about – a fissioning of an original larger body into the Earth and Moon, a capture of a straying Moon, separate accretion from proto-planetary matter, or the most supported new theory, that of a Mars sized object striking the proto Earth and splitting the Moon off from it. So I suppose if your mind is out there enough, why shouldn't the Moon be a spaceship (Populated by who???!!!) that has decided to plonk itself in a pseudo-tidally locked orbit around the Earth (Why???!!!).

The evidence? Well the fact that the craters are all the same depth, supposedly, indicates that Spaceship Moon has an outer “Weather Shield” to protect it from extremes of heat and radiation that is easily penetrated by meteorites before they are stopped by the second Space Shield, a far more substantial barrier. Others claim to have spotted glittering bridges, buildings and even giant lettering. Apparently a couple of Russian scientists put this theory together in 1970 – avoiding deportation to the salt mines – saying the lunar seas were the result of molten slag and lava being created and spewed out by the giant machines that powered Spaceship Moon.

So remember this, the next time you to to bed with the moon shining in through the window. The man in the moon may harbour a terrible secret, and who knows, it could be far deadlier than what HG Wells envisaged dropping in on is from Mars.

And it wouldn't have so far to come, either.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 21.03.14