Ground Control

Are we able to tour a place we will never visit? What if we were able to imagine a 408-km-long selfie stick? Ground Control is a remotely guided tour. Very remotely. It is based on a protocol of daily collaboration between Eytan and Ofri, the astronaut and the artist. Each day, Ofri will be sending Eytan three sentences. For each sentence Eytan will be sending back a photograph.

The sentences, poetic in essence, will not address the familiar monumental images from the Space Station, nor will they be seeking a specific bit of information. The brief texts will be focusing on the non-monumental moments: minutia, routine, sentiments and unfamiliar sensations, transitions between spaces and transitory states. The three pictures that will be sent from Eytan will become the points of departure for a daily chapter in a lecture performance, which Ofri will be creating during the day. This will be broadcast live from the Rakia channels, to the general audience. Ground Control has, at its core, the possibility to be introduced to and understand a place through dialog.

The “Read and respond” method, the exchange of word and image, is the tool used to create a “serial tour” through an alternative space and time. The daily lecture performance will be a tour in the otherworldly. It will artistically and critically discuss terms such as journeys, tourism, navigation, horizon, front, arrival at a destination, route calculations, close-quarters communication in a long-range geography, and the fine details within the greater space.

This is not an astronaut’s photo-journey; rather, it is a remote-guided tour - a shared navigation or sorts, through ideas, images, thoughts and distances in which Ofri uses Eytan and becomes an eye witness that cannot see things for herself. Eytan becomes her eyes, our eyes, and in certain senses, he becomes the “eyes of Israel”.