Nude Artist Floats Free in Zero-G

By Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides

Bradley Pitts let it all hang out on the Russian Ilyushin 76 weightless trainer aircraft July 9th just outside of Moscow.

After six years in the making, his vision of using the experience of weightlessness as a meditation finally came to fruition. But the 20 parabolas Pitts experienced in Russia were not his first. The artist was also a propulsion engineer during the weightless testing of the MIT SPHERES project, an experiment now onboard the International Space Station. Pitts, who has a B.S. and an M.S. in aerospace engineering from MIT, did 80 parabolas with NASA before launching his own project.

Pitts wanted to experience the pure sensation of weightlessness and opted to surrender his other senses to be able to fully immerse himself in space. He closed his eyes, wore earplugs and just let his body drift through space.

"Blind, deaf, and nude is definitely the way to experience parabolic flight!" Pitts said.

Pitts was interested in exploring not just the freedom that weightlessness is, but also the prison. He felt that with nothing touching you it would make all the more acute the literal 'space' that separates you from the rest of the world. Floating motionless in the middle of the largest enclosed 'weightless' space (in the air or in orbit) can leave you feeling seperate. You don't have a lot of ability to move yourself towards the wall of the plane from a standstill. In Pitts view you are a 'prisoner' of space.

Of course the prison was short lived. With eyes closed, Pitts was floating involuntarily into walls (his support team insured he didn't float into anything dangerous) and falling onto the gymnastics mats at the end of every parabola.

Floating naked, blind and deaf does have a certain aesthetic appeal to it. However at 30,000 feet when you are lying on the padded floor of the airplane waiting to begin the next parabolic maneuver, the cold can have a way of seeping in and nipping at your heels. Or was that nipping at something else?

The 11 channel installation that Pitts is creating from the experience will simultaneously show X, Y and Z camera views from the glass cupola below the cockpit; from inside the cockpit; X, Y and Z views from the lab in the plane; three perspectives of Pitts himself as well as the audio recordings of the flight director and the pilots coordinating to orchestrating the smoothest 'hang time' possible for Pitts.

"What interests me is the entire collaboration that has to take place to make this singular, subjective, experience happen," Pitts said in an interview this morning. "When you look at all the footage in sync this really comes through. My nude body is the only calm constant."

You could tell he was just as interested in the technical side of the project as the artistic. "The footage looking outside the the plane is absolutely fantastic. You really feel the physics of the parabolic flight."

Pitts plans to return to Russia, and work to get monitors in the cockpit so the pilots can get even more real time feedback on how smoothly the parabolas are going. He clearly enjoys the collaboration with the pilots and the crew as much as anything, "of course it helps to be able to speak the technical language."

Ultimately Pitts hopes to connect up with private spaceflight operators as well, "I am very interested in space tourism as a free exploration of space." (I can imagine the commercial operators being slightly more open to creative expressions like this then NASA.) I will be interested to see what Pitts dreams up for an encore.

You can see more of Pitts work on his website. (I especially like the "donning the void" vacuum cuff).

Thanks Bradley!