In Straight Circles
Work
2020
HD // Sound
6.00 mins
In Straight Circles traces the path of an imaginary infrastructure through a history of science fiction and speculative science film. After Wernher von Braun, chief Apollo engineer, first popularised the design in the early 1950s, the wheel-shaped space station continues to rotate in imagery from the Space Age to the present. Whether imagined as an intermediary gateway to exploring distant planets, or as a floating space settlement housing thousands of people, the great wheel remains a visual icon at the heart of future visions for human expansion into outer space.
Film Sources: Gog (1954), Conquest of Space (1955), Man and the Moon (1955), Mutiny in Outer Space (1965), War Between The Planets (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Green Slime (1968), Solaris (1972), NASA - Space Colonisation (1975), PBS Nova - The Final Frontier (1978), Elysium (2013).