Space Art in the Anthropocene

A century before NASA’s rocket launches from Cape Canaveral, author Jules Verne imagined the journey. Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun’s 1950s collaborations with Walt Disney and Collier’s magazine helped convince Americans that space travel was a reasonable and feasible pursuit; Chesley Bonestell’s vivid paintings of spaceships and space settlements made von Braun’s visions legible. And shortly after John F. Kennedy announced plans to launch mankind to the moon, NASA launched the Artists' Cooperation program. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg were invited to the launchpads and control centers to help translate the sublime experience through paint and ink. The images that returned from space in turn informed artistic production in the 1970s, as recognition of Earth’s limited resources grew.

In today’s artistic production, concerns with anthropogenic climate change, mass migration, and interspecies entanglements are beginning to collide with the question of leaving Earth again. As renewed efforts to colonize the moon, then Mars, come into focus across multiple national and private interests, how do artists respond? Is their role to represent or translate, as NASA previously understood it, or are artists intervening into the environmental, ethical, social, and institutional questions that emerge with contemporary spaceflight? How do conditions of space travel inform art projects? This panel invites papers that elaborate the stakes of artistic engagement with contemporary space travel. Papers may analyze specific artworks or practices, consider art’s institutional role in or responsibility toward spaceflight, or theorize the shift of the relational milieu in which artistic production operates given an extra-planetary context.