THE OTHER WORLD: A FICTIONAL ORBIT

Drawing on the familiar material from NASA’s lunar explorations and a serendipitous encounter with a memento from the Apollo 11 mission, I am working on an animated film featuring a single, looping orbit around the moon. Rendered from a computer model where planetary positions and orbits are plotted to correspond as far as possible to actuality, the lunar surface itself is based on data collected by the Clementine spacecraft which spent a some months orbiting the moon in 1994. The paper describes and reflects on my work-in-progress on this project in relation to ongoing interests in the philosophies of computing and representation.