c h r i s t o p h e r   r i l e y

video installation

Cone Crater

Opens at The Book Club, London - 31st January 2011

On the morning of February 6th 1971 Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell set off from their Lunar Lander Antares on a walk which would take them towards the site of a 300m wide hole in the surface of the Moon called Cone Crater.  Struggling to accurately determine their position, they never quite made it to the crater rim, despite trying for four hours, and returned eventually to the safety of Antares, exhausted from the ordeal.

In the days before portable live TV from the Moon the explorers set up a colour camera on a tripod near the landing site and pointed it optimistically in the direction they were heading; hoping to relay something of their experience to the watching millions on Earth. But dazzled by the Sun, the camera’s electronics stopped down the iris and blurred the image.  Moments later the fuzzy figures of Alan and Edgar bounded off into the the glare and vanished, leaving the camera and the audience alone with the unchanging Frau Mauro landscape.  It wasn’t that the pair couldn’t use a camera properly.  In fact they brought back the best 16mm film camera footage ever shot on the Moon. It was simply a limitation of the technology of live TV from the Moon, which hampered their desire to share the visual spectacle of their odyssey with the World.

Sound recordings captured the adventure which unfolded as the pair struggled to drag their portable experiment trolley over the terrain and grappled with the challenge of navigation in the rugged lunar terrain. It was one of the greatest human adventures ever to unfold on live TV and yet, lacking any compelling visuals, it was largely overlooked by the moving-image obsessed world.

To mark the 40th anniversary of this unique hike across the lunar highlands video artist and documentary maker Chris Riley has joined forces with the London based creative science agency Super/Collider to create a new video installation which celebrates the Apollo 14 anniversary. “What I wanted it to do is to engage viewers at the start when Alan and Edgar are packing for the trip and then again at the end when they return from being lost, and Alan makes his famous golf swing" explains Chris. "The four hour long, slightly blurred, unchanging camera shot in between draws attention to how mundane Apollo had become, whilst giving visitors the time and space to listen to the voices of the lost astronauts and to contemplate the miracle of what these intrepid extra-terrestrial explorers were really doing."

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