Apollo 11 live - project story

On July 20, 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of putting a human foot on the moon in Warsaw, at the History Meeting House, there was a vernissage of the exhibition: “Reaching the Moon”, curated by Joanna Kinowska. The History Meeting House has created an exhibition presenting a subjective photographic journey from Earth to the Moon, the history of the event shown in the photos from the NASA archives, both in the form of an exhibition and a great album entitled "Reaching the Moon". The vernissage was an opportunity to organize a performance by four artists associated with the Art and Technology Foundation and the Warsaw Electronic Festival community. They were Piotr Michałowski and Marek Kamiński as well as Wojciech Dagiel and Jarek Grzesica.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU-pILke12c

Performing live in front of an audience gathered to experience the atmosphere of a unique event with 50 years of extra-terrestrial history, we drew inspiration from both the theme of the exhibition and the rich sample banks provided by NASA. The material published here by WEFREC is a record of 5 pieces played in the form of an electronic improvisation by the duo Jarek Grzesica and Wojtek Dagiel, who is also the author of the cover and the video. The track names are quoted from jargon torn from the speech of the astronauts and flight control staff at the Houston facility. The music material was analog mastered in the AS One studio by Jarek “Smok” Smak.

Music:
Wojtek Dagiel: experimental artist, works with electronics, performer, designer.
Jarek Grzesica: The author of the soundtrack for the exhibition “Reaching the Moon”, experimental artist, curator and performer.

About the exhibition
Apollo 11 traveled nearly 400,000 kilometers in four days to land the Eagle lander on which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were aboard on July 20, 1969 in the Sea of Tranquility. It is estimated that 600 million people watched the lunar landing broadcast! It is widely accepted that Armstrong and Aldrin only took a few photos of the moon. However, over a thousand photos were taken during the Apollo 11 mission. Several of them immediately became icons and infiltrated pop culture as well as our everyday life.

The curator of the exhibition, Joanna Kinowska, selected about one hundred photos from the Moon (from the American programs Mercury, Gemini and Apollo) as well as astronaut portraits and photographs documenting preparations for space missions. The photos are supplemented with quotes from astronauts' statements during the mission and after its completion (including the most famous ones with a small step or colloquially used: "Houston, we have a problem") and a soundtrack programmed by Jarek Grzesica (Warsaw Electronic Festival).

Jarek Grzesica: The title of the exhibition: "To win the Moon" was to define my life for three months, when I was honored with the invitation of Joanna Kinowska to create the sound setting for the exhibition. Being in the process, however, I realized that the flight, landing - this whole unique project was a gigantic improvisation that can only be honored in one way: by improvising ... To implement this idea, during the opening of the exhibition I invited my friend and great performer Wojtek Dagiel to play together on stage improvised electronic live act. Fortunately, Wojtek did not refuse, giving rise to another project - the release of a record of this event in an appropriately mastered and visually framed form that reflects the spirit of this undertaking.

Wojtek Dagiel: We met Jarek over twenty years ago. He often invited me to projects as part of the Warsaw Electronic Festival, of which he is the originator and artistic director. During all these years, we somehow never met in a musical duo. When he offered me a concert together, I knew it would be a very interesting and unique experience. We were working on samples recorded during the Apollo 11 flight, which was obvious, so during the rehearsals we were looking for some idea what to do with this sound. On this occasion I really wanted to use the electric guitar in an unconventional way. I decided to convert its sound into MIDI in real time, which made it possible to play live sounds recorded by NASA. A magic instrument was created that sounded cosmic.
After we listened to the recorded concert, we decided to release it. The material definitely deserved analog mastering. It could only be done by Jarek “Smok” Smak from As One studio, who is able to extract analog soul from digital music like no one else.

Joanna Kinowska: I perfectly remember the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing. On that day, in the evening, musicians from the Warsaw Electronic Festival, led by Jarek Grzesica, performed a phenomenal concert at the Zachęta-National Gallery of Art. At that time, I was working in the Education Department of this gallery and the love for the moon was just sprouting. When I was preparing the exhibition for the DSH and the American Embassy in Warsaw - from the very beginning I was thinking of it as a combination of images and sounds. Why? I wanted to try to feel like astronauts - find out how the whole journey to the moon went, what they saw, and therefore what they heard. Jarek Grzesica composed a unique soundtrack for the exhibition. The opening of the exhibition was a great event, not by speeches, by no means. I still remember the concert that completed the event. I'm glad that thanks to this release I can come back to the moon whenever I want!