El Club de los Astronautas
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El Club de los Astronautas was founded 2004 as an art group based in Barcelona/Spain. The group also is known as the “first space agency founded by artists and musicians”. There main concern is the exploration of space in a wider sense, experience universe and be in love with it. There work concentrates on the intersection of the three new spaces for humankind: nano space, cosmic space and virtual space.
The group has created experimental and interdisciplinary theater shows telling the story of Apfel a gangster who experiences a drug-inducted vision of an alien called Extra who's home planet Takaluna is in danger to be gorged by an evil black hole, Sagittarius A*. Further characters of the show are Mary Pear and A. There mainly neo-surrealistic artwork includes acting, music, 0-gravity-jazz-jams, dance, graffiti, video art, space art. The group owns an UFO. Recently they are more engaged with the organization of mixed realty events between art and science and between virtual and real world.
The art group is to be conceived as well as a club open for the whole panoply of society: from artist to scientist, from activist to economist. The members of the club are sometimes disguised as alter egos (or avatars) such as reborn personalities from history like Ra the sun god, Christopher Columbus, Amelia Earhart or the Ice Princess from Ampato.
In April 2006 the group organized an “astro-artistic mini-festival” called “26 000 años-luz” and invited artists, scientists and social activists like Amnesty International. Special guest was Giulio Prisco from the World Transhumanist Association how gave a mixed-reality presentation to transhumanism from Uvvy Island in Second Life.
El Club de los Astronautas has the general function of a platform to communicate and interchange ideas, news and visions. It gives the opportunity to its members to profit from each other and get inspired by their own projects.
[edit] The Mare Nostrum Spaceship
The central element of El Club de los Astronautas is a spaceship called Mare Nostrum. The group has worked out an utopistic plan for the spaceship and they are going to adopt and actualize the plan over the time as technologies will develop to turn the plan into real. Mare Nostrum represents a serial of projects in the scientific, social and economic world, those are building the foundation to its construction. One of these proyects is the IBM MareNostrum Supercomputer from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center which was the original inspiration to the spaceship. Other projects presented by Mare Nostrum are COROT, ITER, Blue Brain, Second Life, etc. Further more the spaceship is connected to sociocultural topics like transhumanism, virtual reality, the human rights movement, the greenhouse effect, etc.
