IINA KOHONEN SERIES

The weather favoured the conference because on the second night a star party was organised with the assistance of the astronomical society Warkauden Kas- siopeia.

The conference papers will be published as a book edited by Yrjö Sepänmaa. Three themes were discussed from the different points of view, the mythological and religious sky, the sky as atmosphere and space, and the imaged and imagined sky. Looking at the subject from the perspective of cultural history, aesthetics, spirituality and the sciences, separately and together, opened up interesting views. The conference approached this multi-layered idea from three perspectives: through its cultural and scientific significance, through different individual perceptions and how the various experiences could be depicted. People attach multiple, parallel and overlapping meanings to the concept “celestial”. The artistic contribution included several art performances, posters and exhibitions. The theme was the aesthetics of the sky, space and heaven.

IINA KOHONEN SERIES

The 7th International Conference on Environmental Aesthetics was the culmina- tion of a series of scholarly conferences arranged between 26 and 28 March at Valamo Monastery in Heinävesi by Yrjö Sepänmaa, Professor of Environmental Aesthetics at the University of Joensuu. The exhibition ended with a walk and series of events through the centre of Helsinki from Kiasma, the Museum of Modern Art to the Ursa’s Observatory, with a stop and visit to the Helsinki University Observatory. The artists and scientists also discussed explorations in time and space. Agnes Meyer-Brandis enlivened a voyage to the Moon by using a special species of geese - Moon geese (see Figure 2) - as told by Francis Goodwin in his book, The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonsales, published posthumously in 1638. This group of artists had trav- elled to Novosibirsk for the 2008 total solar eclipse. At Kiasma, the National Museum of Modern Art in Helsinki, an international team of artists, Jussi Kivi, Oliver Kochta, Iina Kohonen and Mika Taanila created a multi-faceted art exhibition and an interlinked series of events named Expedition To The Solar Eclipse, running from 6 March to 7 June with themes relating to solar eclipse expeditions and space travel, with Ulla Taipale as curator. In the IYA2009, the arts received public attention at many events in Finland. The importance of this scientific discovery is made clear in the monument’s design, as in just a few decades, a tool essential for a breakthrough in research was used as a symbol in the statue, and its significance was generally recognised (see Figure 1).

The importance of spectral analysis is indicated in the monument to Emperor Alexander II and to the political reforms and advanced legislation of 1863 in Finland. It became possible to find the composition of the stars and other celestial bodies. This new technique revolutionised chemical analysis and marked the begin- ning of two new sciences - physical chemistry and astrophysics. The 150th anniversary of spectros- copy, invented in 1859 by Robert Bunsen and Robert Kirchhoff, was also commemo- rated. Cosmic evolution played a major role at the lectures and at other events. IYA2009 was officially inaugurated in Finland on 7 January 2009 as one of major events of the Science Forum, a nationwide biannual science communication event held from 7 to 10 January 2009 at the University of Helsinki. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War. Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and ‘60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest.

Iina kohonen