Futurescope 3 – Here comes ‘The Sun’.

'The Sun'. All is revealed.

This week the third image in the ‘Futurescope’ series was unveiled at Lingfield Point Darlington. ‘The Sun’, a photograph by Thierry Legault was chosen as part of the developing narrative by artists Christian Barnes and John Kennedy of Vista Projects. I’ll let Christian explain:

‘When we proposed Futurescope two years ago we intended to put an image of the sun into it at some stage. We hadn’t really decided what image to use this quarter until a few weeks ago. Our interest was in making a connection between plants/green space and solar energy upon which plant life (and therefore all of us, depend). We were also interested in the idea of placing an image of the sun on a building created to burn coal.’

‘The idea of including an image of the sun is part of the unfolding narrative that links to Beeman and Sunflowers, the previous images to have appeared in Futurescope. It is part of a speculative projection of a future world in which we would not be able to consume energy without dealing with consequences for ourselves that were not understood when this ‘dependency’ was established.

This is a future in which landscape (especially urban and post-industrial landscapes like that at Lingfield Point) would need to be productive without the energy of oil. This is one of a batch of photographs taken by Thierry Legault, showing the transit of the International Space Station across the sun. The first group were taken from the area of Mamers (Normandy, France) on September 17th 2006 and show the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis.’

You can get a better insight into the artists’ thinking by clicking on the blog link below;
http://futurescopedarlington.blogspot.com/