FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE // Simon Norfolk
This dialectic runs throughout the world of modern rocketry. Their launch vehicles are massive cans of metal and tons of industrial fuels; yet the satellites and missiles themselves are infinitely delicate packages of microchips and sensors. A world of the practical limits of rocket science is conjoined to a world of weightlessness and omniscience. Satellites and missiles are born in worlds of utter secrecy - in skunkworks and shady research facilities. They are launched from closed military bases - and live out their lives in the soundless dark of deep space, silently listening and processing. But there is one moment in their lives when they advertise their existence with a ground-trembling exuberant din that lights the night skies like a second sunset: the 45 seconds or so it takes for them to lift from their launch pads and disappear thousands of miles downrange, way up high. This leaping into the void is what Simon has chosen to concentrate on; this tiny (photographable) crack in a world of secrets.
The launch moment represents a threshold between two realms in the passing from one to the next, the earthly and the heavenly; and the missiles leaping across them. They may have feet of clay, but their heads are in the stars. The everyday, the man-made and the industrial is transformed by roaring fire into the Sublime and the God-like.
The word missile has Latin roots -to send, and the earliest known uses of 'satellite' in the 16th century meant 'follower' or 'bodyguard' from the Latin 'satellites' meaning 'attendant.' So the word began its orbital journey meaning a sort of kindly handmaiden, then lost its subservient status in the middle of its life coming to mean something autonomous and machine-like; and has finally returned to a meaning of attendance, something to watch over us. But the kindness has all gone. Now the watching over us is entirely cruel and sinister. The satellites and missiles at America's disposal are a crucial projection of it's global power: an invisible, iron fist that allows America to intercept all our communications, photograph our every movement and, using envisaged space-based weapons, eliminate America's opponents at the flick of a switch. It is not for nothing that the motto of the USAF's 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral is "Control Of The Battlefield Begins Here."
Behind all these pretty, lofty words, one can never forget that the purpose of all this sublime technology (down here in the sub-luminary world) is to sharpen the knife: to finesse America's ability to find, follow and kill its enemies. (And who knows how they define 'enemy' these days?)
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If you are interested in this feature or to commission London based Simon please do not hesitate to contact Matt Shonfeld - matt@instituteartistmanagement.com Tel: +44 1225-462-968
