In early December Tim Belknap set up a small, brightly-lit open-walled cube inside Temple Gallery that was an almost-convincing replica of a space capsule. The cube, no longer there, was called the Destiny Module, a reference to the US Space Station’s Science Lab, and was part of Belknap’s project to beam Astronaut Tim via Skype video into a Philadelphia 4th grade classroom for a science talk. Tim — who is not a scientist or astronaut but an artist and Fleisher Challenge winner with a mischievous sense of play — harnessed himself to a cable attached to heavy metal beams he installed in the cube (in his day job he does custom steel fabrication) and hung suspended in front of a video camera as if he was floating in zero gravity. The students believed the ruse, at least at first, and asked him questions like Is the moon a cookie? and When will the earth explode? In this clip Tim talks about childhood innocence and his art as something about lost innocence. Listen to the full episode next Monday.
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