Learning To Moonwalk

Learning To Moonwalk is a short video study about using a moonwalking simulation device known as the Walker, created by Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Andrew Friend in 2022 as part of Very Very Far Away.

The work was first submitted and selected for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam, where it was presented on 17 July 2024 as part of panel P003, Outer space: imaginaries, infrastructures, and interventions. It later became part of the wider Crafting the Otherwise research thread on epistemic artefacts, ontological reordering, and design as enquiry.

Moonwalking here is not treated as a whimsical image of astronauts loping, skipping, hopping, and stumbling across the lunar surface. It becomes a critical way to explore how bodies meet unfamiliar worlds, and how imaginaries can be made tangible through devices, movement, rehearsal, and performance.

Learning To Moonwalk

The Walker turns abstract speculation and silly walks into visceral moments where the imaginary can be felt, tested, and understood emotionally, intellectually, and perceptually. It is not an exact mimicry of lunar gravity, but a reconditioning of perception through movement: balance, tempo, horizon, and ground become unfamiliar.

The device becomes a narrative instantiation of moonwalking, an experiential form through which cosmic ideas are approached from the ground up. In this sense, the Walker is less a prop than an epistemic artefact: a made thing that changes what can be sensed, thought, or done.

The video is part of an ongoing research enquiry into imaginaries as tangible spaces of investigation and infrastructure. It uses designed simulation as performance, asking how narratives of space exploration are materially instantiated, embodied, and encountered.

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