Too G
2003
Video – 4 mins
“Everything normal. Everything working perfectly.”
Andrew Kötting’s video ‘Too G’ was made after Arts Catalyst’s second trip to the Gagarin Centre in 2001.
Inspired by the overwhelming force of 2G and the ensuing befuddlement, the work might be read as a tongue-in-cheek homage to Yuri Gagarin, the people of Star City and the pioneering artists who attempted to create work on a plunging aircraft. Kötting provides an insight into the madness of experimentation in the extreme environment of a zero gravity flight on a Russian military base, where Gagarin’s face smiles down at you from almost every building.
A wobbly B-film rocket follows a similar trajectory to the parabolic flight path, reaching for the stars before plummeting nose cone first back into the hard Earth, echoing the Russian’s more brutal approach to re-entry landings than the NASA ocean splashdowns. The rocket’s flight links a kaleidoscope of grainy archive images from Moscow, Star City and the parabolic flight on which Kotting participated.
CREDITS
Film made by Andrew Kötting.
Project commissioned by The Arts Catalyst
Flight: MIR Flight 001
