MARINER 9
2012 | 3-channel HD video installation, 43' x 9' (variable) with 5.1 audio
Originally commissioned by Tyneside Cinema, UK

RELATED TEXT
Kelly Richardson talks sci-fi futures, life on Mars and Mariner 9
Interview with Rosemary Heather (Canadian Art, Oct 4 2012)
Life and death on Mars
Catherine de Lange (New Scientist Magazine review, Aug 22 2012)
Kelly Richardson: Mariner 9 and Legion
James Smith (This Is Tomorrow Magazine review, Aug 20 2012)
Mariner 9 at Whitley Bay's Spanish City Dome
Toni Marie Ford (Newcastle and Me blog, Aug 15 2012)
Mariner 9 at Whitley Bay's Spanish City Dome
Adam Clery (NARC Magazine review, August 9 2012)
Why does sci-fi always look more marvelous than reality?
Jonathan Jones (The Guardian, August 8 2012)
Crowds flock to Mariner 9 exhibition at Spanish City Whitley Bay
David Whetstone (The Journal review, August 8 2012)
Artist Kelly Richardson brings a taste of Mars to Whitley Bay
Mark Brown (The Guardian, August 7 2012)
Artist Kelly Richardson's 'Mariner 9' Depicts Futuristic Mars Landscape On Day NASA's Curiosity Lands
(Huffington Post, August 6 2012)
NASA technology helps get video art off the ground
Alan Sykes (The Guardian, August 3 2012)
Interview: Kelly Richardson
with Adam Clery (NARC Magazine interview, July 2012)
An Epic Imagination
with David Whetstone (Culture Magazine interview, July 2012)

RELATED VIDEO
New video shows junkyard Mars
(ITV Tyne Tees News, August 6 2012)
Pixel Palace mini-documentary on the making of Mariner 9

RELATED LINKS
More about Mariner 9 on the Pixel Palace website

Supported by Canada Council for the Arts, NASA, NewTek and Planetside Software

Mariner 9 presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one.

Mariner 9 was created using scenery-generation software employed by the film and gaming industries in combination with technical data from NASA's missions to Mars to produce a faithful artist's rendering of Martian terrain, populated by the debris from centuries of exploration through real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a duststorm. "Cinematic tropes of sci-fi films abound, but any search for a clear narrative is frustrated. Presented with minimal action, we wonder instead about the search for life beyond our own planet and the simultaneous destruction of life on earth." (Laurel MacMillan, Programmer for TIFF Future Projections)

Coinciding with the landing of NASA's Mars Science Labroratory aka "Curiosity" on the planet at the beginning of August, in a 12-metre long panoramic installation Richardson's Mariner 9 saw its world premiere in the raw splendour of the Spanish City Dome in Whitley Bay, August 3 - August 19, 2012.