melt with you

Melt With You

Britta Johnson

In 1972, the crew of the Apollo 17 snapped a famous photo of the earth on their way to the moon; that photo,The Blue Marble, played a huge role in the launching of the environmental movement. In 2016, as consensus builds around the idea of naming our current geologic era the Anthropocene, acknowledging the role of people in the earth’s ongoing transformations, the moon provides a perfect perch for us to not only see our vulnerable home with fresh eyes, but to provide over-laying commentary.

Melt With You consists of a camera stationed on the moon, trained continuously on the earth, with a glass vial containing a small amount of water positioned between them. Every moon-dawn, a circle of ice that has formed in the vial over the image of the earth melts and pools, tear-like, at the bottom of the image; the camera time-lapse records this, and posts the recording to a website.

The sculpture also takes infrared temperature recordings of the earth; when the recordings suggest that the earth is no longer steadily warming but has dropped down to temperatures at or below the average level recorded in 1972, it posts celebratory recordings of the moon-evening’s condensation and crystallization of the water over the shape of the earth instead of the melting.

Mechanics

The apparatus required to record both a distant planet and close meltwater in focus is a cross between a view camera and an optical printer. The glass vial has a circle ground onto one side and a deep, circular indentation on the other. A lens and bellows on the sky side bring the image of the earth into focus on the ground glass circle; a camera photographs the image projected on the glass through the indentation. The water sealed in the bottle gathers and condenses and freezes in the indentation in the evening and melts in the morning before evaporating. A casing of wire and black rubber surrounding the vial helps to absorb and evenly distribute the sun’s heat around the indentation.

To compensate for libration (perceived movement due to the slight tilt and elliptical nature of the moon’s orbit), the base of the apparatus is equipped with a motion control rig that adjusts the positions of the camera and bellows. The camera is shielded to protect it from extreme temperatures and passing magnetic fields, and its batteries are replenished by solar cells. A small pile of electronics take temperature readings, trigger the camera, upload the images to the internet, and allow for other remote controls.

Cargo weight: 26.1kg; return payload: 2.1kg
Budget:  $12,550

images courtesy of NASA and the artist