MOON CELL IS INCUBATING…

by Thomas Beale and Mileece

7th - 15th October (daily 24 hours)

Window, 56 Brook Street, Mayfair, London, W1K 5NE

Created over the summer of 2022, through a deep and inspiring collaboration between Thomas Beale, Mileece and the Re•World Fair team, Moon Cell is Incubating was the birth of a journey… visitors were invited to join us in its unfurling.

Fittingly with Moon Cell’s roots as the space technology that provided power and water to the 1960’s Apollo space missions to the moon, perhaps the best the analogy to describe Moon Cell’s outer ‘MoonShell’, seen here through the gallery window portal, are the strange monoliths that feature in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As the opening scene unfolds, a dark monolith lodged in the bleak, mars-like landscape, casts a shadow over the apex ape, ‘Moonwatcher’, who seems to come to the sudden realisation he can use a bone as a tool, and commences to use it more deliberately till the next shot, where we see it transformed into a tapir; it is the first step in the development of technology and the evolution of modern society.

The following scene shows a nuclear satellite, possibly nodding to the perilous pathway to which we have wielded our nature to direct technology. But it is the final scene, where a flock of gliding monoliths silently but powerfully emerge through space, burrowing through the force of Ligeti’s harmonically dissonant soundscape, that the monoliths’ paradoxical presence– possibly meaningless, possibly the seeds of evolution, but either way undeniably curious– cemented in Mileece’s mind. Despite all the other uncanny details that seem to directly relate to what it represents, this memory has guided her for ‘many moons’ towards the creation of MoonShell, the first and pertinent step of bringing Moon Cell, back down to earth.

MoonShell, meticulously crafted by artist Thomas Beale from local forest wood, seashells and the canonised remnants of trees victim to the 2022 summer fires in the southwest of France (where it was created), illuminated literally and figuratively the natural processes and philosophies of Moon Cell itself. It was a result of processing readily-available, local, and inexpensive (free) materials with tools that are easily assessable and can be fashioned without reliance on impenetrable extractive industry.

The charred tree plinth support, or ‘Moonolith’, if you will, presented both the reality of the perils of our current technologies, as well as proposing an alternative direction; a biophilic energy device that is Moon Cell, a technology to make power and water whilst keeping trees green and protected.

So like the 2001 monoliths, the Moonolith was at once literal, symbolic and interpretive, and a gateway to the imperceptible electrochemistry and potential that is Moon Cell, into something tangible and visceral; in sum a handcrafted, naturally captivating, undeniably curious and possibly evolutionary ‘beautiful thing’.

Click here to learn more about Moon Cell and stay tuned to this page for announcements and updates on the 2023 show presented by Illuminate Productions.

Moon Shell Moonolith: Sea shells, Carbonised tree bark (remnants of 2022 summer fires southwest France), found wood, LEDs.

Artist: Thomas Beale

Concept and Technical Design: Mileece

Funding partner: Arts Help

About Thomas Beale and Mileece

Thomas Beale is a New York-based artist who works primarily with found, natural materials. He has shown his work internationally, with sculptures in the collection of institutions including the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania, AU), the Hood Museum (NH, USA), and The Bunker Artspace (FL, USA). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a National Endowment for the Arts U.S-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kaplan Foundation, and others. In addition to his work in sculpture, he founded and directed Honey Space, an exhibition space active in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York from 2008-2012, which the New York Times called “one of the city’s strangest art establishments.” Thomas currently resides and works in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Mileece is a sonic artist, interactive ecological environment designer and 'biophilic energy ambassador' devoted to “promoting ecology through technology and the arts”. Since the early naughties, she has hand-built custom technologies to drive immersive, interactive, experiential hybrid-organic environments, performances designed to 'illuminate our innate and hidden connections within the biosphere’ in museums (MoMA NYC, TATE Modern), festivals (Global Citizen NYC, Sonar HK, Loop Berlin, BHIF Festival Bhutan), venues (Kew Gardens London, Sonos Studios LA, CAC Shanghai) and over broadcast television (VICE Motherboard, AGT NBC, Arte) across the world. In 2005, she developed what she calls ‘aesthetic sonification’ by creating her bespoke hybrid hardware/software system, PiP (People’s Interface for Plants), that transforms the bio-emissions of people and plants into harmonic, spacial, generative ‘organic electronic music’ which features in her solo works as well as scores in award winning nature-promoting animations (Miwa Matreyek ‘This World Built Itself’ 2015), VR experiences (TreeHugger & Ocean of Air 2018 & 2019 Marshmallow Laser Feast), shorts (Guayaki Tea ‘Come to Life’ 2019, Adobe Summit 2020) and feature films (Horse Girl 2020) often composed in the airstream studio/garden habitat she hand built using almost all recycled materials, featured in the NY Times Home Section and other best-selling architectural books and magazines (Justina Blakely’s ‘The New Bohemians’,Geo Turkey, BRUTUS Japan). In tandem, she has worked alongside her father and his colleagues on nature-driven, community-led, carbon negative energy systems, presently developing creative cultural initiatives to put them publicly accessible.

Re•World Fair, founded by Mileece in 2022, is a fiscally sponsored program of Re:wild, designed to create a culture of eco-citizenry through interactive demonstrations and experiential installations connecting artists, cultural events and their communities with biophilic energy and infrastructure that meet humanity’s critical and modern needs with the needs of nature.