[click here to print this entry]
By: Isabel Dunstan
Date: 16th Apr 08
Medium: Design
Drink: Anything, as long as you look good holding it
What:
Orbit Oblique
Where:
Craft Victoria, 31 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
When:
Launches Thurs Apr 17, 5.30pm
How much:
Free
The mid-fifties were great for drive-in cinemas, beat poets and swing dancing. But the victims of the Cold War and Soviet Union vs America space-race weren’t so lucky to revel in the PEZ-fuelled, post-World War frivolity of the fifties. Soviet Union scientists were hooked on the idea that living organisms could survive in space. So, to prove this hypothesis right, they shot out a K-9 into orbit with fingers crossed it would survive. It didn’t. But that didn’t stop them from trying again.
Orbit Oblique is a typography exhibition dedicated to the monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, frogs, worms, fish, spiders and fruit flies launched into space to test future conditions for mankind. Expect illuminated billboards of belly-rattling statistics and the launch of new typeface, Bisque. It’s nice that even though most of those unwilling participants for space research were left up there, some of us haven’t forgotten about them down here.