Alice Jarry and Marie-Pier Boucher at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris
September 2022
Alice Jarry and Marie-Pier Boucher present two papers at the IAC Paris: Air After Space: From the Invisible to the Tangible and Down to Earth: on Space Urbanism and Space Cities.
Alice Jarry and Marie-Pier Boucher present two papers at the IAC Paris: Air After Space: From the Invisible to the Tangible and Down to Earth: on Space Urbanism and Space Cities.
Air after Space: From the Invisible to the Tangible is a play on words that seeks to create connections between the experience and the conceptualisation of air on Earth and in space. Can the differences between the ubiquity and assumed access to air on Earth and its scarcity in space give rise to a renewed understanding of its political economy? The paper looks at two artistic practices, that of Tomas Saraceno and Alice Jarry, to render visible the social, environmental, and critical dimensions of an invisible milieu. We first discuss the work of Tomas Saraceno, who reflects on the toxicity of air through large-scale airborne installations involving haptic and embodied participation. We then turn our attention to [re]capture by Alice Jarry, a project that creates a dialogue between atmospheric data in the city and a gallery installation. As both projects underline important questions of socio-environmental justice, this paper engages with the manifold manifestations of air: as data, as environments, as ecosystems, as survival conditions, and as a playground.
Down to Earth: on Space Urbanism and Space Cities takes the form of a manifesto to formulate a series of demands towards the construction of an inclusive and equitable global space program. Informed by four artistic and civilian initiatives, the paper addresses the Earth-based right to interplanetary infrastructures of telecommunication. Its premise is that the city is a prime location for the concretization of space technology, and therefore a productive site from which to invent new social and cultural values. It introduces four projects, Cesar Saez’s Geostationary Banana Over Texas, Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, Brazilian Satellite Hackers, and Simon Weckert’s 99 smartphones, which act as provocations for addressing the right to global equity, the right to sensory experience, the right to hack, and the right to slow down. Together, these four principles suggest new cohabitation strategies that are examined in their capacity to give rise to informed engagement with space technology.
