1. MARCO BRAMBILLA – APOLLO 18
Marco Brambilla’s Midnight MomentMission at Times Square NYC
March 1-31, 2015, every night from 11:57 p.m. – midnight
"The space age represented a landscape of optimism, capturing the
imagination of the public. With Apollo 18 I hope to recapture the golden
age of manned space travel as a spectacle presenting Times Square as the
virtual launch site." -Marco Brambilla, artist
2. At the close of the Apollo program and the dawn of journeys to Mars, as expedition
technologies segue from hybrid manned-electronic to virtual models, the NASA
program has become a particularly poignant metaphor for the shift from physical to
surrogate models of exploration. Inspired by this period of transformation, artist Marco
Brambilla, presents Apollo 18 for its inaugural run, in cooperation with NASA and at the
invitation of Times Square Arts and the TSAC. As part of Midnight Moment, a monthly
presentation by the Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts,
Apollo 18 transforms the New York City landmark into a virtual launchpad, playing
across dozens of its electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night
throughout March.
A reinterpretation of mankind's relationship to space exploration in the electronic age,
the video collage presents the countdown to an imagined lift-off of a Saturn V rocket.
Weaving never-before published archival footage from NASA missions with
computer-generated imagery, the frenetic countdown builds dramatic tension without
climactic release, compressing the entirety of the imagined mission into spectacle.
Playing off of the medium and sheer scale of the installation at Times Square, Apollo 18
has been conceived as a communal public event; this adrenalin-inducing work
compresses the epic idea of manned space exploration into the feverish moments of
anticipation just before liftoff.
Marco Brambilla is a Milan-born, New York-based video collage and installation artist,
known for his elaborate recontextualisations of popular and found imagery. His work
has been exhibited in major collections worldwide including Kunsthalle Bern, the
Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ARCO
foundation, Madrid, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. His video
installations have been screened at Venice Film Festival (2011) and the Sundance Film
Festival (2012). In early 2015, Brambilla also showed his Megaplex trilogy at Fondation
Beyeler, Basel, and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.
