Translunar Paradise is a basic storyboard for a future science fiction television series that takes cues from a poem by W.B. Yeats and Douglas Trumbull’s film Silent Running (1972), which featured spaceships with forests positioned in orbit around Saturn threatened with extinction due to man’s greed and avarice. The series Translunar Paradise combines recent astronomical findings with environmental philosophy and existentialism in the main set—a Dyson Tree.

The backstory to the Translunar Paradise series is that a colony of Dyson Trees have been created and safely populated within a habitable zone behind a moon of a large ringed planet system like our Saturn. A stretch of science, but not of imagination, the series posits that the Trees would have access to forms of water coming from the icy moon and a source of constant energy—ionized plasma—that could be used by caretakers to power other aspects of these life-boats in space. The cyclical journey of the Trees, a metaphor for the human spirit and its relationship to the divine structures of the Universe, allows for myth, spiritualism, and ancient Druid traditions from Yeats’ ancestral land of Ireland to permeate the science fiction show. As sculpture, the pedestal for Translunar Paradise referenced the command center on the Bridge on Battlestar Galactica, from where strategic battles were planned in the ongoing war against the Cylons; but instead of positioning battleships, this sculpture suggests the viewer engage and cultivate aesthetic traditions like penjing (Chinese: “tray scenery”) to create these massive new landscapes.