Bussard Ramjet - Hardcover

Timberlake, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906441197 ISBN 13: 9781906441197

Publisher: Artwords Press, 2009

Synopsis

"We might rethink that 1960s TV footage of suited-up Apollo astronauts waving in the Florida sunshine to wonder what public reaction might have been had those sterile antechambers disgorged air force colonels with newly re-modelled and socketed crania or eyes, proboscises or extra limbs; what reaction Kennedy's announcement of the Apollo Program might have received had he simultaneously declared the subsumption of the US into some pan-global structure of governance and resource management; that the mission objective was Proxima Centauri, not the Moon. Televisual history re-imagined thus becomes a delirious Gothic dream..."

The Bussard Ramjet was a concept proposed in 1960 by the distinguished physicist R.W. Bussard in which advanced civilisations would be able to travel the vast distances between the stars by constructing engines that would gather hydrogen atoms in deep space, subsequently fusing them to produce a directed jet of thermonuclear plasma.

In the works reproduced in Bussard Ramjet Timberlake addresses notions of realism and fiction in photography and their proximity to constructions of utopias and dystopias. Photographic landscapes are partially re-painted in a photorealist style suggesting future or past events. Interweaved with these images and bearing on 9/11, fusion-theory and space travel, John Timberlake's compelling, three part narrative weaves Sci-Fi with contemporary realism to counter tarnished and myopic notions of `future' civilisation(s) and landscape.

Published in collaboration with Artis Den Bosch, `s-Hertogenbosch,
The Netherlands

About this title

About the Author:

John Timberlake is an artist and writer based in London, Recent exhibitions include: Colony, New Art Gallery, Walsall 2007, Curious Nature, Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn Cornwall 2008, Remember a future past, Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art, London 2007, A Song Turning Inward, Tatjana Pieters/One Twenty Gallery, Ghent 2007,

About this edition

• Publisher: Artwords Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1906441197
• ISBN 13: 9781906441197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48