Designing for Openness to Experience.
Why we should take artists to the moon
The #dearMoon project by Yusaku Maezawa is in my view one of the most inspiring and endearing projects we’ve had since we first stepped on the moon.
For decades we’ve been sending scientists to space but with this project, taking artists is profound because unlike scientists, artists have a higher openness to experience (OTE) — a personality trait related to curiosity and appreciation for aesthetics. According to Paul J. Silvia, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, OTE affects people’s experiences with art and other aesthetics through many different ways. Individuals who are high in OTE value aesthetics more, are more interested in novel and unusual things and have more knowledge about art and aesthetics. Such knowledge about art and aesthetics might be a key catalyst to achieve the heightened feeling of awe from the overview effect.
What scientists have that artists might not is context. As astronauts are often advanced scientists and engineers, their experiences reflecting on the Earth might be contextually rich (e.g. they may be thinking on the advanced processes in our magnetic field, the structure of the atmospheric layers, our “goldilocks” orbit around the sun). This presents an amazing opportunity to provide artists with context as part of their training allowing a balance between OTE and context.
For these individuals to experience space is monumental from a scientific, intellectual, philosophical, sociological and of course artistic point of view. It’s a whole new way of going to the moon so in a way, it’s like going to the moon for the first time because we don’t know what the experience will be for people with a higher capacity of OTE.
“From space I saw Earth — indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone.” — Muhammad Ahmad Faris, Syrian Astronaut
Every artist will experience the Overview Effect, a phenomenon that is a cognitive shift in awareness to oneness, to planetary thinking. This is something only astronauts have experienced. When researchers David Yaden and Johannes Eichstaedt from the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center analyzed excerpts from astronauts from all over the world who documented viewing Earth from space. Themes emerged from the quotes, ideas like unity, vastness, connectedness, perception — in general, this sense of an overwhelming, life-changing moment.
“When we originally went to the moon, our total focus was on the moon. We weren’t thinking about looking back at the Earth. But now that we’ve done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went.” — Dan Weaver
It’s a phenomenon we should be racing to have every human experience. In fact, there needs to be more of a collective inquiry, “how can we induce the Overview Effect without going to space?”
Art can indeed promote peace and so much more. It holds the power to transform and transcend. It is a universal language we all speak that crosses borders, religion, race and politics because of our intrinsic love for beauty, high on OTE or not. The reason I design experiences with art is its ability to deliver and exploring different ways of experiencing awe. This is a result due to my belief that there’s arguably two types of awe — awe evoked in passivity and awe evoked experientially.
NASA astronaut Ron Garan explains this incredible feeling in his book, The Orbital Perspective. After clamping into an end of a robotic arm on the International Space Station in 2008, he flew through a “Windshield Wiper” maneuver that flung him in an arc over the space station and back:
As I approached the top of this arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth — this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space — a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction.
The Overview Effect is the most potent delivery of awe, as of now, in the human experience. Researchers Paul J. Silvia, Kirill Fayn, Emily Nusbaum, & Roger E Beaty describe awe as a “powerful state,” characterized by “wonder, amazement, fascination, or being moved and touched.” If you think about it as space being the most potent delivery mechanism of awe, then you realize we have micro versions of it on earth, and art is one of the most popular way we experience awe. We’re awe struck when a musician takes the stage, when James Cameron releases Avatar, when an adventurer jumps out an airplane, simply watching a sunset or walking among the Redwoods. Research has shown that two things in particular can promote a feeling of awe — aesthetic beauty and a sense of vastness. There’s millions of moments on Earth where we’re experiencing the Overview Effect in micro doses because these experiences can also shift cognitive awareness in us. Space is a full dose, the most potent delivery of awe and that delivery is experiential.
The way we experience art is important to its potentially profound impact on us because it holds unique messages that can shift our cognitive awareness. Art delivers awe, a feeling I believe to be one the core traits of human’s existence as we’re constantly driven by it like we are by connection. Taking artists, who already have the capacity to deliver awe, to space so they can experience a new found relationship with awe is one of the most important things we can do as a species. We have no idea what the impact of this will look like because perhaps artists will be able to describe this feeling differently from astronauts. And that’s important.
That being said, I believe there’s a missing candidate in the cast of art forms — the experiential artist.
Experiential artists understand many facets of art, particularly, how to get humans to be. Traditional artists come from the lens of their story, experiences, perspective and technique to create art and use that to provoke awe. An experiential artist is about being. The lens is the multitude of art that will be in a physical environment to evoke ways of being. How can we get humans to connect, to be vulnerable, to feel, to move, to be still and so on? That’s our inquiry. Awe is the tool used to inspire ways of being and art is my delivery mechanism. As an experiential artist, one constantly weaves other forms of art to create a space of being for the participants. The reason this is important is that such an artist can create spaces that invite us to try on a different way of existing. Today, and in fact, always, that’s a rare privilege because we are constantly being is programmed by society, by culture. We walk around every day of our lives believing this is the best way of being but we really don’t know what we don’t know. Experiences can allow us the opportunity to explore that we don’t know. We get to try it on and if it doesn’t work, we get to leave it behind because that’s the capability of humans.
It is imperative to our societies to explore new ways of being that comes from within so the culture we reside within can be influenced by that and not the stories of a select few.
I bet that each artist will come back from #dearMoon with ideas of experiences because they will want to share what they’ve experience and their art will be the best way to deliver that experience. It stands to reason that having an experiential artist in that crew could yield the opportunity to weave with their peers a space of being quite profound for the world to experience.
This piece is a humble nod to Yusaku Maezawa in appreciation for the love, admiration and respect he’s showing artists in a very meaningful way that resonates globally.
References
The Overview Effect — Stacy Shaw
Psychologists study intense awe astronauts feel viewing Earth from space — University of Pennsylvania
