Ephemeral Afterimage
ISS 2022, Moon 2025
Ephemeral Afterimage is a sculptural extension of Carmelo Pampillonio and Samuel Hertz's Librations project. It launched into space on February 19th, 2022, where it will orbit aboard the International Space Station until 2025, when it flies to its permanent destination: the surface of the moon. The piece consists of a recorded echo of the artists’ own reflected voices — which was bounced off of the moon and received by radio observatories around the world — and kinetically seared into a reflective sphere.
“Burned into the retina” is engraved with CO2 into steel, the most commonly used metal in industry, like a last metabolic breath. The mineral history of the earth bubbles up and towards the moon, and as industry lurches outward to extend its grasp on our planet’s satellite, we experience a flattening of our collective romanticized fantasy of the moon as a pristine object of our heavenly firmament.
The rhythmicity of the Earth-Moon system and the echoes within emerges through the line, palpably tethering our social timescale to a more-than-human geologic timescale, and casting it off to our planet’s satellite to be found again.
Full project statement here.