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Spacearts is being developed under a cooperation between Leonardo/Olats
and the OURS Foundation.
Leonardo/Olats (the Leonardo Observatory for the Arts and the
Techno-Sciences) is a non-profit society devoted to research and
online publishing in the field of arts and techno-sciences. Its
activities are organized around four main axis: special projects
(Virtual Africa, Space and the Arts Project, the Cultural Groundings
of Globalization); the Pioneers & Pathbreakers project which
proposes an online documentation (monographs and notices) on the
artists and thinkers of the 20th Century that have been pioneers
in an art practice and theory related to techno-sciences; the
Essays where seminal texts and new current analyses are being
published or republished online; and the Highlights, which provides
information and reviews on new media art, bibliographies, etc.
Leonardo/Olats is strongly involved in Space Art through various
projects among which: The Space and the Arts Workshop (also called
"Rencontres du 13 avril"), a yearly one day seminar
that has taken place in Paris since 1997 and that gathers together
artists, scientists, engineers, theoreticians on a specific topic;
the space art bibliography; the coming space art chronology and
the Space Art Database in collaboration with the OURS Foundation.
Leonardo/Olats is the French-speaking branch of the Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology) and as such benefits from the experience and the knowledge of the journal Leonardo and its international network and community in the field of space art. Leonardo has been publishing articles by space artists since 1971.
Project Manager - Leonardo/Olats
Annick Bureaud lives and works in Paris, France. She has been involved in art, science, and technology activities since 1985. She is the director of Leonardo/Olats. She initiated and still is the editor of the International Directory of Electronic Arts/IDEA online (nunc.com). She is a new media art critic (regular column in the French contemporary arts magazine Art Press; contribution to Leonardo publications, etc.). She is a teacher in new media arts at the art school of Aix-en-Provence, the Ensci (National School of Design in Paris); she has been guest teacher at the School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC, 1999) and the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM, 2001). She curated several exhibitions of new media art. She has been interested in space art since the mid-eighties and is running the Leonardo/Olats special project on this topic. In 2002, togehter with Nathalie Magnan, she co-directed the the book "Connexions: art, réseaux, médias" published by l'Ensba
press.
The OURS Foundation is a non-profit cultural and astronautical
organization founded and established in 1990 in Switzerland by
Arthur Woods. The primary purpose of the OURS Foundation is to
introduce, nurture and expand a cultural dimension to humanity's
astronautical endeavors. This task is being manifested through
the identification, investigation, support and realization of
related cultural, astronautical, humanitarian, environmental and
educational activities which may take place both on and off planet
Earth, and which are deemed as beneficial to the development and
advancement of human civilization in this new environment.
During the past fifteen years, the OURS Foundation has organized numerous cultural events in relation to outer space such as space art exhibitions, symposia and publications, for instance during the International Astronautical Congresses (IAC) in Oslo, Turin, Melbourne and Amsterdam. The OURS Foundation organized the first European Space Art Workshop in 1992 and has been a partner with Leonardo/Olats in the organization of the subsequent workshops on Space and the Arts. It also organized the realization of two “art-in-space” projects on the MIR space station: the spaceflight of the Cosmic Dancer sculpture in 1993 and, in 1995 in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), "Ars ad Astra – the 1st Art Exhibition in Earth Orbit" as a part of ESA’s EuroMir95. The OURS Foundation also developed and currently manages another online database project, ITSF - Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications, initiated by ESA.
Project Manager - OURS Foundation
Arthur WoodsArthur Woods is a space artist and cultural entrepreneur. He spent his youth living near the Kennedy space center in Florida where he witnessed the beginning of the American space program and where he later worked during the Apollo program. He settled in Switzerland in 1974 where he began his career as an artist. In the mid-eighties he was one of several pioneering artists around the world who proposed to create artworks in the environment of space. His 1985 Orbiting Unification Ring Satellite (O.U.R.S.) project to put "a circle in the sky" to celebrate the new millennium with a symbol of peace and unity led to the manufacture of a prototype orbital artwork called the OUR – Space Peace Sculpture (OUR-SPS) which was built in the Soviet Union by NPO Energia in 1990. These early projects led to the later realization of two art-in-space projects: the spaceflight of his Cosmic Dancer Sculpture in 1993 and "Ars Ad Astra: the 1st Art Exhibition in Earth Orbit" on EuroMir95 – both flown on the Mir space station. He is founder and president the OURS Foundation, founder and CEO of Swissart GmbH an Internet company that has developed and maintains "swissart.net" a major online art portal in Switzerland and he is also co-founder of spaceOp sàrl – a Swiss space company specializing in space-related cultural activities. He is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), a Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) and a guest lecturer at the International Space University (ISU).
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