Moon Palace is a LEEDS 2023 project in East Leeds. It is a quirky and unusual piece of artwork that doubles up as an observatory, and was formerly a school bus. It will embark on an epic tour of Leeds, inspired by Leeds born, Father of Civil Engineering, John Smeaton.
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00:00 Okay so welcome to Moon Palace. I'm one of the artists. I'm going to give you a
00:05 little tour of the interior space, what we've got here and what it can do. As
00:11 you come in you'll be coming into the first sort of lounge area. We have a main
00:18 telescope here, a large optical telescope and an observatory dome. We're in a bus
00:25 I should say to start with. It's an old-school bus so it was ferrying school
00:29 children around just before Christmas last year and we've completely stripped
00:35 it out and refitted it to be a mobile observatory. So an observatory that can
00:42 look at the stars, it can listen to the stars, we have a radio telescope on board and we
00:47 can also feel the stars and hear the stars as well with various different ways
00:52 we've got of experiencing space. More than just an observatory to see the
00:56 stars it's also an observatory for thinking about what's around us as well.
01:01 So it's a place for conversation, discussion, for slower kind of contemplative
01:08 moments for thinking and reading and finding new connections
01:14 between ourselves and between ourselves and where we live and between ourselves and the universe.
01:21 So there's lots of detail in the piece. I mean as artists what we wanted to do
01:28 is bring lots and lots of disparate things together. Odd things you know, odd
01:33 sort of aesthetic references, materials to create something that felt kind of
01:39 confusing but recognisable and something a little bit magic as well. So there's
01:46 lots of sort of reference points for us that come from historic film, from
01:51 literature, from our backgrounds as well growing up and all brought together.
02:00 So let's say we have like a big telescope in here, that's the sort of main element in here.
02:04 We also have these very comfy sofas. So one of the things we wanted to make was
02:10 a space that was just incredibly comfy that people can really relax into.
02:16 You could come on board and have a snooze, you know, you could pick a book,
02:20 we have a library of detective fiction. One of our reference points is this idea of
02:26 detective fiction that, you know, detectives do this thing where they look really
02:30 closely at the world and then at some point they make these unseen connections
02:34 and then they reveal them to the, they reveal them and at that point that the
02:41 world sort of shifts and changes and that's what we do as artists and it's kind of
02:45 what Moon Palace is here to do as well. That it, you know, creates all these new
02:50 connections and for the visitor maybe there's a sort of, there's a shift in how
02:54 they see the place they live and their relationship to the planet, to the
02:57 universe as well. So these seats are made out of the old bus seats so we
03:02 super upcycled them, took them all apart, re-welded them in a different
03:07 configuration, made new cushions out of the original 20 year old school bus
03:12 fabric. It's kind of wild. As we go down the bus, the bus is sort of divided by
03:19 these curtains so there's 12 new artworks that we made which are these
03:24 sort of smushy pastel mushroom moonscapes, look at them that, which you know they
03:34 create this sort of softer texture to what to the space. It also allows us to
03:39 have like a group in here, maybe talking to one of the science hosts and then a
03:43 group in here having kind of more open conversations with our artist hosts as
03:49 well. So here, this area here, this is the workspace, it's a desk, we've got a couple
03:56 of monitors hooked up to some pretty cool computer stuff which is linked to the
04:02 radio telescope on the roof, that's the big dish up there, looks like a big satellite dish.
04:07 Radio telescopes are listening for the radio waves that come off planets, off the sun,
04:12 stars, so they create a radio wave, like a sine wave you'd see on a computer but
04:18 each of everything out there has a different kind of signal so we can look
04:23 at them but we can also translate them into sound as well so you can listen to
04:27 the sound of the Sun, you can listen to the sound of different planets as well.