Marco Brambilla’s Apollo XVIII (2015) tests Baudrillard’s proposition that simulation precedes the real against the densest concentration of commercial screens in the Western hemisphere. The installation occupied fifty-four advertising screens across Times Square nightly throughout March, synchronized from 11:57 PM to midnight as part of the Midnight Moment program organized by Times Square Arts and the Times Square Advertising Coalition. At midnight, a Saturn V rocket ascended the billboards in sequence, climbing from street level toward a vanishing point above Forty-Ninth Street. The rocket belonged to a mission that never flew.

Apollo XVIII demonstrates why these institutions have recognized his practice as a sustained investigation into how the apparatus Guy Debord termed the spectacle mediates the social relationships it purports merely to reflect. The installation stages the ghost of an unrealized departure: the eighteenth Apollo mission, planned but cancelled when the American space program could no longer sustain public attention despite having constructed the rocket. As Brambilla has noted: “Obviously, there were only 17 Apollo missions, but they built a rocket for Apollo 18 that was never used. By that point, the American space program wasn’t attracting enough attention, so they decided to stop the Apollo program.” A rocket built without launching. A mission numbered without execution. A future fabricated in metal but never realized. These facts open three analytical threads that converge on a single problem: what becomes of collective aspiration when Debord’s spectacular apparatus has colonized the very space in which aspiration might be articulated.

Marco Brambilla Studio