From Weight­less World to Hy­brid Homes: Rethinking the Extra-Terrestrial

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

• From Weight­less World to Hy­brid Homes: Rethinking the Extra-Terrestrial

• Leonie Cooper

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

  A space sta­tion is not just a weight­less world de­signed to ac­climi­tise as­tro­nauts to the con­di­tions of liv­ing in space – it is a habi­tat, both real and imag­ined. Draw­ing upon my re­search into the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions that en­abled the imag­i­nary con­sti­tu­tion of the space sta­tion as a habi­tat, I will ex­am­ine how NASA now em­ploys aug­mented and mixed re­al­ity tech­nolo­gies to blur the bound­aries be­tween the vir­tual worlds ac­cessed via the com­puter screen and the world in­hab­ited by the as­tro­nauts. Since build­ing on the In­ter­na­tional Space Sta­tion began, as­tro­nauts have played at house­keep­ing in space, their rit­u­als meant to be wit­nessed by those who ac­cess NASA’s web por­tal and its stream­ing media broad­casts. If these home-mak­ers have been agents des­ig­nated with en­act­ing the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal con­di­tions for emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, then has their func­tion shifted with the in­tro­duc­tion of the first robot as­tro­naut, Robo­naut2, into the crew? And what of NASA’s use of Sec­ond Life, has this vir­tual world be­come the site at which the same spa­tial imag­i­nary that sent ‘men to the stars’ is merely reen­acted? Work­ing in the in­ter­stices be­tween space sta­tion and vir­tual world, I aim to ar­tic­u­late an am­biva­lence that haunts these hy­brid habi­tats, one that might open up al­ter­na­tive ways of imag­in­ing the re­la­tions be­tween self, screen and world.

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Category:

• Panel