Laura Davis meets the German artist who is training a flock of geese to fly to the moon at FACT
IT IS with proud, upright posture and the impenetrable expression of someone on the cusp of making history that the future astronauts carry out their training.
Sunlight reflects off their impeccable white suits as they practise flight formation and tap out messages in Morse code.
Named after those who have left Earth’s atmosphere before them, Neil, Svetlana, Gonzales, Valentina, Friede, Juri, Buzz, Kaguya-Anousheh, Irena, Rakesh and Konstantin-Hermann have been specially bred for this purpose.
Hatched from eggs by their adoptive mother, German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, they are “moon geese” – the subjects of an artistic experiment created for FACT’s new exhibition.
Opening at the Liverpool gallery on Friday, the Republic of the Moon show invites a range of artists to create work about the moon and space travel.
Meyer-Brandis’s contribution is a control room linked to the farm in Italy where her moon geese are kept. The birds will be filmed and streamed live into the gallery, where visitors can interact with them by sending messages.
Sensors placed on the ground pick up the tapping motion of the geese’s beaks and translate it into Morse code, which is then transmitted to a series of electronic displays at FACT.
