LASER Paris - Planetary portraits

30 March 2023, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (FR)

LASER Paris - Planetary portraits

Lily Hibberd, Venus: Didilia Corona, oil on board, 2022 Image courtesy of the artist.

"Planetary Portraits"

More info at https://www.olats.org/portrait...

Rencontre LASER Paris - Thursday March 30th 2023 - Cité internationale des arts (Auditorium) - 18 rue de l'Hôtel de Ville 75004 Paris 19h00 - 21h30

with Lily Hibbert , Alice Le Gall , Dominique Genty , Guillemette Legrand

Free admission registration required (https://tinyurl.com/2w6ca65t) - We start on time! - LASER Paris takes place in French

  • PopUp Exhibition by Lily Hibberd, series Venus
  • Drinks and snacks after the presentations
  • Audience announcements during the break (with registration)

Programme

Lily Hibberd, Artist (Australia - France) // "La planète Vénus - à sonder, à rêver, à connaître" (Venus: probing, dreaming, knowing)

What we call the evening star is a planet. A planet that rotates in the opposite direction to all the others in our solar system and on which we find many volcanoes bearing the names of women since in 1979 the international astronomical union decided to name the topographical features of Venus after historical figures or feminine mythology.

Venus is central to the creation mythologies of nearly every known civilization on our planet. Venus was also the limit of the initial space missions. It was found to resemble Earth, not only in size, but also in composition and shape. These are some of the reasons why it is popularized as our "sister" planet although we could not live there.

Since 2021, Lily Hibberd has explored more than 100 sites on the surface of Venus, and the history of their female counterparts, through painted scenes. These eerily detailed landscapes are inspired by images known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) taken by NASA's Mariner 10 and Messenger spacecraft in 1974 and 2007.

In this LASER Paris Meeting, Lily Hibberd invites us to an encounter with Venus in this double dimension: our twin planet which could teach us things about the Earth and about ourselves and a strange world populated by women.

Alice Le Gall, planetologist, researcher at the University Versailles Saint-Quentin, at the LATMOS - Laboratoire ATmosphères et Observations Spatiales (Laboratory for Space Observations and Atmospheres) // "Titan démasqué : Portrait d’un satellite sous les brumes" (Titan unmasked: Portrait of a satellite through the mist)

Titan seems straight out of a science fiction novel with its clouds of methane and its lakes of hydrocarbons.

Initiated in 1988 from projects dating back to 1982, the Cassini-Huyghens mission, launched in 1997, saw the Cassini orbiter arrive around Titan in 2004 and the Huygens lander land in 2005. The mission, completed in 2017, opened a window on this celestial body which allowed a set of discoveries and knowledge but also the emergence of many other questions.

Alice Le Gall will lift the veil of Titan for us. Saturn's largest moon, it is the only satellite in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere. Under a thick envelope of mist and at a temperature of -180°C, the surface of Titan, revealed by RADAR, is home to giant dunes, hydrocarbon lakes, mountains and rivers.

The landscapes of this frozen world are strangely familiar and raise questions about our origins and the possibility of a life elsewhere.

Dominique Genty, geologist, paleoclimatologist, Research Director at the CNRS, EPOC laboratory, University of Bordeaux // "Spéléothèmes : archives des climats passés et outil de datation des cultures préhistoriques" (Speleothems: archives of past climates and tool for dating prehistorical cultures"

Drop by drop, limestone concretions grow at the bottom of the caves. Layer after layer, they capture, even more acuratly than the glaciers, the traces and the history of the planet, its climate, the activity of those who populated it, human and non-human.

Major climatic cycles of the order of 100,000 years, rapid millennial climate variations, abrupt events, the study of speleothems can thus reveal in a spectacular way the evolution of the climate of the past millennia, making it possible to inform the present as well as provide a precise dating of the occupation of the Grotte Chauvet or other prehistoric sites.

Through a few examples, Dominique Genty invites us on a journey where he will show how information is extracted from speleothems, making it possible to reconstruct the evolution of the climate with great temporal precision, then the archaeological interest of these objects which have made it possible to date , for example, the oldest known construction in the world, before addressing the aesthetic aspect of these scientific objects, available in high-resolution photographs, cyanotypes and daguerreotypes.

Guillemette Legrand, designer et artiste (Germany - France) // "Remaillages planétaires et interpolations cosmologiques : les limites et les possibles de la représentation du climat" (Planetary remeshings and cosmological interpolations: the limits and possibilities of climate representation)

The "Blue Marble", image of the Earth photographed in 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 Mission, has turned red in the IPCC models.

In this new research project, Guillemette Legrand questions the limitations of describing the Earth as a system and of volumetric modeling as the only possibilities for dealing with the climate crisis.

It explores the conflicting realities of the Earth as a biochemical substrate, its simulation and the world(s) that emerge(s) from it by mobilizing the technological apparatus that detects and models the Earth.

Her hypothesis is that by using the cosmogram (a description of a cosmology) as a research tool, it is possible both to examine the technological system as it exists and also to recompose a new theory and practice of climatic representation. The project seeks to create a space in which other disciplines can intervene, other scales can be created and multiple representations can co-exist.

Through a technical and conceptual narration of this algorithmic process, this presentation questions what is created, deformed and lost and speculates on other ways of thinking about planetary remeshing through an artistic investigation.

  • Moderator : Annick Bureaud
  • Drinks and snacks after the presentations
  • Audience announcements during the break (with registration)

Programme created by Leonardo/ISAST (www.leonardo.info), LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendez-vous, www.leonardo.info/laser) is a sharing of experiences around art-science projects in semi-formal meetings, outside the institutional framework.

LASER Paris of March 30th 2023 is organised by Leonardo/Olats in partnership with the Cité internationale des arts and La Diagonale Paris-Saclay.

Video's (French)

Annick Bureaud, Introduction, Portraits Planétaires

Lily Hibberd - La planète Vénus – à sonder, à rêver, à connaître

Alice Le Gall - Titan démasqué : Portrait d’un satellite sous les brumes

Lily Hibberd et Alice Le Gall, discussion

Dominique Genty - Spéléothèmes : archives des climats passés et outil de datation des cultures préhistoriques

Guillemette Legrand - Remaillages planétaires et interpolations cosmologiques : les limites et les possibles de la représentation du climat

Dominique Genty et Guillemette Legrand, discussion