Mission Art

Pre-festival event (February 22 & 23, Houston, TX)
How many people do you think have sent something they’ve painted into space? What if YOU could be one of those people? Be part of a history making mission–work side by side with artist Edgar Medina to help create a unique work of art that will be launched into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket!

Adult Session: Feb. 22nd, 6:30 – 9pm. $100 per participant. (includes wine and appetizers)
Children’s Sessionon Feb. 23rd, 11am – 12pm. $50 per participant. (includes snacks)
Email rod@mediaartexploration.org to sign up. Participation limited to 20 per session. You can see more of Edgar’s work on his website: medinaedgar.com/

Festival Event (May 18, San Francisco)
After having been to space on a Blue Origin rocket, Edgar Medina’s painting that festival goers helped create at a pre-festival event will be displayed and auctioned.

Witness the triumphant return of Medina’s painting that was created through collaborative effort and flew among the stars!

Photo credit: Blue Origin

Star Stories

Star Stories represents Lakota youth from South Dakota's Rosebud Sioux Reservation as they collaborate with elders to retell their tribe's ancestral cosmology.

Lakota youth from South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Reservation collaborate with their elders to retell their tribe’s ancestral cosmology in new media.

Photographs taken by the youth will be on display as well as a multimedia presentation that delves into specific star stories and interviews conducted by the children of figures in their community.

Photo credit: Lakota Youth

The Outer Space

The Outer Space is a program put on by collaborator Ethan Lipton.

A couple buys an old spaceship to leave behind an overcrowded Earth in a musical about moving out and into the final frontier.

Ethan Lipton and his band take you on a journey about trying to run away from it all only to run into yourself, in space.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Particle/Wave

Particle/Wave is a multimedia planetarium presentation that sees poets, musicians, sound and video artists joining forces with renowned scientists to interpret the theories of gravitational waves.

Photo credit: Andrew Watson

 

 

 

 

Spacewoman of the Underground

Collaborator Christine Zeurcher attempts to dig a hole to the other side of the planet while wearing a handmade spacesuit.

Christine Zeurcher attempts to dig a hole to the other side of the planet while wearing a handmade spacesuit!

Adjacent to her dig is a Ham radio where she receives transmissions from all parts of the globe. Viewers are invited to investigate her findings and tune into the radio transmissions to experience the voice of the unknown. The Dig celebrates the human urge to explore while interrogating the instinct to exploit.

Illustration by Jeffrey Murray

Everything Beautiful is Far Away

Collaboratir Xin Liu defies gravity by exhibiting her robot’s space dance and death at the Exploratorium Black Box through her own narration about her robot’s very human journey.

Xin Liu’s sculpted avatar comes to life in space and dances through the cosmos on a Blue Origin rocket, until it is destroyed upon reentry.

Liu defies gravity by exhibiting her robot’s space dance and death at the Exploratorium Black Box through her own narration about her robot’s very human journey. Everything Beautiful is Far Away explores how each person holds a relatively inconsequential, but wholly unique place in this world.

Outta this World Poetry Slam

Outta This World Poetry Slam

Young Bay Area poets will confront the theme of the New Space Age with sonic rhythmic constellations of poems in the festival’s poetry slam.

MAX has partnered with the renowned Youth Speaks to bring together hundreds of students at the nexus of space science and poetry. Young poets meet with scientist mentors before the slam and are given feedback by our esteemed judge’s panel. Come enjoy and support new voices in poetry and space science!

Universal Threads

Artist Andrea Lauer and Astrophysicist Janna Levin use fashion as a medium to communicate the story of the universe.

Take fashion into the 4th dimension!

Watch these celestial looks come to life with augmented reality. Artist Andrea Lauer and Astrophysicist Janna Levin use fashion as a medium to communicate the story of the universe, and the mysteries of Spacetime.

Mapping Microbes: The Search for E.T

How are microbes, organisms that live on and in us, the key to finding extraterrestrial life?

Find out at Mapping Microbes: The Search for E.T. where MAX is getting microbial! Ask our partner Cal Academy scientists about the microbes all around (and inside) us and perhaps some ‘alien’ microbes we have here on earth! The search for extraterrestrial life — and perhaps the origins of life — begins not outward, but inward.

Robots as Our Partners: Pas de Deux

Sasha Samochina, producer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Visual Operations Lab demonstrates how her AR and VR creations allow scientists in collaboration with their robots to explore the unknown — providing a virtual space for a pas de deux between a human on earth and robot on Mars or Jupiter! This connection between scientists on Earth and robots in outer space prompts the question what is the relationship between human and machine as they are propelled forward by one another into the furthest reaches of everything we’ve ever known?

This presentation will be accompanied by Pas de Deux – as dancer Alice Sheppard performs, Alex Reben’s robot will interpret her movements drawing them on a piece of paper as she goes – exploring the connection between human and machine and how it propels creativity and discovery. We invite the audience to imagine the ways technology reflects our humanity and interrogates it