Artist expression seems to be our oldest form of expression, or at least our oldest enduring one. As such, our artists (which includes all of us, when you think about it; all of us who have ever been…) have by now bedecked this world of ours with the products of our creativity. We’ll keep at it, of course, covering and recovering old ground in new ways…but still the question begs, aren’t there new venues for the display of handcrafted imagination?
Well yeah, there are. One of them is straight up.
To date around a couple thousand satellites have been launched, three or four manned space stations have been, well, manned, and just shy of 200 astronauts and/or cosmonauts have slipped the the surly bonds of earth (…), yet very little in the way of cultural aesthetics has left our atmosphere. On October 29th of this year, that’s set to change.
Clyde Space Ltd., a Scottish aerospace company specializing in “micro spacecraft systems,” engineered and built this shoebox-sized weather-monitoring satellite, almost entirely with functional scientific purposes in mind. They recognized, however, a rare opportunity to marry art and engineering. So they gave the pop-artists at L.A.’s iam8bit gallery a call.
The result of that collaboration is an etched-exterior design, in the modernist pop tradition, that will 
circle the earth at an altitude of nearly 400 miles, for an estimated 25 years. After the launch, it will probably never be seen by human eyes again.
But will it be seen by others? Just in case, iam8bit included this message:
Greetings Beleaguered Space Traveler. Welcome to the Universe’s First Celestial Charging Station.
Will that stave off an invasion? Will it win us some interstellar friends? Will it lead to the first zero-gee art gallery?! Time will tell.
For now, let’s just revel in the fact that the work of iam8bit will very soon be going where no art has gone before.
