Art that Re-imagines Community and the Commons in the Vacuum of Outer Space

Outer Space has become a beleaguered frontier replete with conflicts of goals and ideology. Can art help change this trajectory? Given that the problems we face on earth have become planetary - a global environmental crisis, and also a global inequality crisis - the proposed panel asks how art (through stories, images, sound and curation) can address these collective problems to help ensure they are not repeated in our age of space exploration and coming extraterrestrial habitation. This panel proposes to explore aesthetic models for future space governance that engage with postcolonial approaches to extractivism and to a future that considers alternative outcomes. Examples include Afrofuturists and others who provide creative imaginaries of space exploration; collaborative VR works such as To the Moon (2018) by Hsin-Chien Huang and Laurie Anderson; musical scores such as that composed for Apollo Chamber Players that commemorates the Apollo11 moon landing with Native American poetry; and Saskia Vermeylan’s legal attempt to update the 1967 Outer Space Treaty through curating art. The promise of art is to enable a post-capitalist condition in which outer space can approach a creative commons, enabling an exchange of resources. Pertinent governance models including Graebar and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything and Robinson's Ministry for the Future will be compared to earlier models (e.g., Fuller's Spaceship Earth, Margulis' Gaia hypothesis, Brand's Whole Earth Catalog). The potential of the commons includes open communication systems and cultural heritages that provide a basis for social and ecological cooperation and is central to the art discussed.