An Irish company hopes its artistic project will give viewers the experience of life in space, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

As the Space Shuttle Discovery safely re-entered the earth's atmosphere and calmed the shredded nerves of Nasa scientists by landing safely at Edwards Airforce base in California, a little-known Irish company embarked its own piece of galactic history.

Space Synapse, a small and virtual organisation based at the Digital Hub in Dublin, is a next-generation space art promoter whose ambition is to put interactive art works on the International Space Station (ISS). Space Synapse has just secured the second phase of an innovative project to bring interactive art to outer space.

The majority of us associate space with the ultimate in technological achievement (as well as some dramatic failures), but art in space is an established though little-known genre.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is one of the largest sponsors of original artworks in the world. Nasa's collection comprises primarily fine art commemorating specific achievements in space flight, or imaginings of what might be, but that is not all. From the mid-1980s onwards, Nasa has had a policy of carrying artworks on its payloads, provided that the artwork could be classified as a scientific experiment.

That stipulation has allowed space artists to devise a variety of artworks to bring an artistic sensibility to a highly technological domain, an objective now taken up enthusiastically by the European Space Agency.

"The European Space Agency believes strongly that the cultural world should have a say in the future of space exploration," Daniel Sacotte, ESA's Director of Human Spaceflight said back in May, when launching a study on the cultural use of the ISS. "We therefore want to open the ISS to a new community of artistic and cultural users."

That's where Space Synapse comes in.

As a contributor to the European Space Agency, Ireland has a role in deciding how its own contribution is spent, and over the past two years Space Synapse has been a front runner in the race to have its artwork installed in the ISS, supported by the Space Unit at Enterprise Ireland.

Space Synapse's objective is to broaden the experience of space to those people who have no hope of joining the commercial zero-gravity flights proposed by entrepreneurs such as Virgin Galactic boss Richard Branson.

Space Synapse's project will assist interested parties on earth to interact on a daily, even a minute-by-minute, basis with astronauts, and to engage with the experience of living in space.

If all goes according to plan, this will be achieved through what Space Synapse owner Anna Hill calls Symbiotic Sphere, which she describes as "an interactive artwork fabricated using precious etched metals and gems from around the world, fibre optic lights and wireless communication that free-floats with astronauts and gathers inspirational space data".

Symbiotic Sphere is like an electronic pet that astronauts will be able to touch and communicate with. But it also collects data, and that data will be visualised by Hill and shared with user groups such as schools, designers, and even medical researchers, because part of the data set will be the biorhythms of astronauts. These are important for determining the effect of space travel on the human body.

Hill hopes that Space Synapse's results might also find outlets in wearable computing, clothes that replicate some of the experience of space, or for example in art installations that replicate emotions such as fear and excitement captured through skin sensors worn by astronauts. The combination of artistic and utilitarian purpose is typical of space art and integral to the process of understanding what space travel means to us. And it is relevant to making space work culturally.

"It's one of the stipulations of the Irish contribution," says Hill, who was previously a resident artist at the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

"Money spent on art for the ISS should earn a return, penny for penny."

That's feasible in the Space Synapse project because the data has value to a number of research communities as well as being the basis for visual expression. "It's also a way of tapping into the enormous expenditure on space exploration and making it relevant elsewhere," Hill says.

Her project is currently seeking bridge funding from Irish sponsors. The commercial element of space art has broad social objectives. Space travel is taking human beings beyond their natural limitations and it raises ethical and emotional questions.

"Space challenges our sense of what is seen, heard or known," says artist Richard Clar, who also organises artist-scientist workshops under the auspices of the European Space Agency. "Space is 92 per cent dark matter. And we don't know what that is, so space is a great unknown and art has a role in revealing what we don't know."

Clar favours a definition of space art whereby artists use the unique properties of space or the unique philosophical concerns that space travel raises to create or inform artworks.

His "orbital debris constellation sculpture", Collision II, is a video installation that communicates the immediate dangers of space exploration. It represents 192 pieces of space debris.

"Debris is a serious problem," says Clar, who points out there are now thousands of orbiting space objects, including frozen nuclear reactor coolants that are leaking from a number of Russian satellites, and there are intermittent collisions and explosions in low earth orbit. "Orbital debris constellation uses data from the Naval Research Laboratory which tracks the debris. I selected the objects and periodically we're able to visualise their presence against the background of all space debris."

Clar's focus on the meaning of space exploration recently took him back to his artistic origins, communicating with extra-terrestrial life. He is working on a new project to create an unambiguous language in order to communicate effectively with any potential alternative life forms that might come into contact with humans.

"It came about after a chance remark from a scientist at Nasa," says Clar, "who asked, 'if we are to communicate with another culture, how can we make unambiguous statements?' "

Clar's answer was to work with a choreographer to create a dance that typifies the rhythmic movement of the human body. He then used a new form of photography that captures each element of movement in the dance, in effect breaking the body down into a series of snapshots of specific movements.

He intends adding this to a future Nasa or ESA payload as an object for other life forms to discover, much like we might now discover Palaeolithic remains and piece them together to form a view of previous human life.

Anna Hill agrees that space exploration has emotional and spiritual implications that to date have played a subsidiary role to the technical aspects, and the sense of technical mastery that space flight engineers like to portray. "My work focuses on emotion and spirituality," she says. "And the European space effort has a focus that's different from the American, because it springs from the EU, which was formed to bring peace."

These two artists are using their work to ask new questions not only about our relationship to space but about also the resources we have committed to its exploration. In the multi-billion dollar world of rockets, shuttles and space stations, the ethical and spiritual dimensions are gradually securing a voice.

The International Association of Astronomical Artists is at www.iaaa.org. Space Synapse's mission is spelled out at www.spacesynapse.com. View Richard Clar's work at www.arttechnologies.com. View information on Nasa's Space Art programme at http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/ er/seh/spaceart.html. The European Space Agency is at www.esa.int