IEEC joins Panoramic festival to celebrate how space inspires art
In the inaugural evening of the festival, on 17 October, IEEC researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) Guillem Anglada-Escudé will host, together with the director of the festival, Joan Fontcuberta, the conference “Ultima Thule, the colonisation of space”.
Ultima Thule is a Greco-Latin term describing a place beyond the known world and it is the nickname of the most primitive and most distant object ever identified in the Solar System. Ultima Thule was chosen as a slogan for this edition of the festival as a metaphor and a way to give perspective to the programme.
(486958) 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, is a trans-Neptunian object located in the Kuiper belt. It was discovered on 26 June 2014 by astronomer Marc Buie using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope as part of a search for a Kuiper belt object for the New Horizons mission to target in its first extended mission.
Launched by NASA in 2006, the New Horizons probe is capturing images of Ultima Thule that will help to study the beginnings of our planetary system more than 4,500 million years ago. It is expected that the New Horizons mission will operate until mid 2030 and could explore objects of the Kuiper belt.
Taking place in Granollers, the festival will include exhibitions, documentaries and film projections by some of the most celebrated visual artists nowadays, as Martin Parr, Cristina de Midde, Marcel·lí Antúnez or Rubén Torras.
At a time of hyper terrestrial connection, from the Panoramic Festival we look at space, we leave the Earth.
“The sky is one of the first excuses for fiction, for dreaming and giving meaning. Humans raise their eyes and imagine the universe, exploring, photographing and filming adventures in it.
The moon takes care of poets, conspirators, conquerors, animists and weightless. African astronauts? Amazon on the moon? Yes. And much more.
There is no other entity that has so strongly united and fascinated scientists, artists and shams alike.”
Video:
Title: Ultima Thule, the colonisation of space
Caption: Artistic video about the “Ultima Thule, the colonisation of space” conference.
Credit: Festival Panoràmic.