This is a recreation of Duchamp’s “3 Stoppages” in zero gravity.

On 23 January 2020, Oliver Chanarin, together with a team of physicists from the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen, carried out a historic experiment; the recreation of Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Stoppages (1913) in zero gravity.

Duchamp made 3 Stoppages by dropping a one-metre rope on the ground three times, each time tracing the line with a pencil. “The experiment was performed in 1913 with the aim of freezing and preserving forms obtained by chance, by my chance,” Duchamp explained in an interview in 1964.

For the recreation of the 3 Stoppages, a one-metre rope was dropped into a vacuum from a height of 110 metres into a sealed capsule. The shape of the rope, as it floated released from the forces of gravity, was scanned in three dimensions. Chanarin paid homage to Duchamp by releasing the capsule, along with Dr. Olympia Kyriopoulos, en la cabina de control de la Drop Tower en el Applied Space Technology and Microgravity.

It took three months of meticulous organisation and four seconds of weightlessness to create “Gravity is the attraction between distant objects”, a 21st century imprint of Duchamp’s iconic work.