STELLA AND VOYAGER (Mexico, 2020)
“Stella and Voyager” is a virtual sculpture composed by the encounter, the romance, between the NASA space exploration probe Voyager, and the virtual asteroid, Stella.
“Stella and Voyager” is a conceptual point of convergence between the virtual and the physical, between historic reality and fiction and between timelessness, planetary time scales and pop retro-futurism.
The launch of the NASA exploration probes, Voyager 1 and 2, in 1977 was highly significant in our ideas about the outer space. It fed the futurist imagination and pop culture of the late seventies and of the eighties, influencing the further retro-futurist expressions of artists inspired by the seventies space age and its imaginations, like the electronic music duo Daft Punk, who supposedly tributes the Voyager with a track of the same name included in their album Discovery, released in year 2001.
Daft Punk’s Discovery album was transported to an anime series of video clips called Interestella 555, which is a tribute to the post-war space themed Japanese anime from seventies and eighties decades. Stella is the main character of Interestella 555, a female alien bass player who is kept kidnapped in Earth and has to be rescued by her lover.
In Studio Victor Pérez-Rul’s virtual sculpture “Stella and Voyager” the idea of the relation between fantasy, Sci-Fi, retro-futurism, speculation and the exploration of the universe and outer space is layered and fused in this object composed by the merging of the bodies of the Voyager probe and the SVPR virtual meteorite Stella (named after the mentioned Interestella 555 main character).
The fusion of Stella and Voyager gives arise to this, practically mystical, intergalactic drifting device that we make appear in different locations like Mars, Earth and The City of Immortals, almost like the monolith of "2001: A Space Odyssey" movie.
My favorite image of the ‘Stella and Voyager’ series, which is a remix, or more like a mash-up, is where ‘Stella and Voyager’ appears in ‘La Ciudad de los Inmortales’ landscape and virtual space.
The influence that the electronic music culture has had in my work is wide, but maybe the most constant thing is the idea that everything is remixable, referable, and susceptible of combinations. One day I heard on the radio that The Chemical Brothers usually (re)sample their own previous tracks and sounds, the idea surprised me, I liked it.
Today I see this remixing activity, the mash-up and the self-sampling as an organic way to iterate the artwork until it is unrecognizable, a way to mate some pieces together, to mate some ideas with others as if it was a genetic experiment, or even better, as if it was a garden: a space where a series of living things relate until they fuse in mutualist relationships, until they devour each other, until they mate and exchange, despite of whatever I originally had in my mind and despite the scrupulous repudiation to self-reference that others might have.
So far, my favorite apparition of the virtual sculpture ‘Stella and Voyager’ is in this world I created too, called ‘La Ciudad de los Inmortales’, a world that only exists to accumulate ruins, to accumulate beings that exist in the edge of life and other virtual absurdities.
