An installation to celebrate the first moon landing
Composer Simon Belshaw has launched a kickstarter campaign to create an installation celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing which will be sited in St Thomas Library.
This project will build a model of Apollo 11 and a representation of the moon's surface, similar to the type of display you would see in a museum. Simon is interested in generative music and disruption to musical processes. As part of his work he developed a number of, what he terms, Music Machines that explore these ideas. An early one of these (Music Machine 8) used Neil Armstrong's famous speech from the surface of the moon "That's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind". The music machine takes each word of this sentence, along with both the pause that Armstrong left in the middle of the sentence and the beep sound that was a feature of the communications between the earth and the astronauts, and plays them in a random order. There will be a small button on the outside of the case (again, similar to the type of displays you may see at the Science Museum) which will then play the Music Machine.
This installation will be placed in St Thomas Library in Exeter in the week leading up to the anniversary (July 20th) and will be there for a period of at least a week. There will be a launch event at St Thomas Library where I will give a brief talk about the installation. There will also be more space themed videos and memorabilia to see and discuss. This installation will hopefully inspire children to discuss and explore space and space travel to a greater depth.
For more details please visit the Kickstarter page:
