Nothing, Something, Everything

Ono’s project imagines the future of the Earth’s climate and our behavior on this planet. A cylinder-shaped magnet that points back to Earth’s magnetic North and South in absence of gravity, regardless of its location, is a metaphor of longing and belonging. A roll of Minox subminiature camera film containing the 2016 Paris Agreement and other climate documents reveal more about ourselves than the messages Voyager spacecraft could carry. 1cc of Paris Air, sampled at the city where the COP 21 delegates had met, invisible inside a capsule, is never to be unsealed by the people on Earth. By sending these tokens from our world to outer space, and metaphorically exposing and addressing them to future generations or potential extraterrestrials in our universe, his project aims to inspire those who inhabit this planet today.

On March 6, 2020, MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative launched a payload to the International Space Station with my three minerals aboard. The payload, “Sojourner 2020,” featured a three-layer structure which created three different “gravities.” Each layer of the structure rotated independently. The top layer remained still in weightlessness, while the middle and bottom layers spun at different speeds to produce centripetal accelerations that mimic lunar gravity and Martian gravity, respectively.

Source: https://cop21.net/