Outer Space and Popular Culture: Influences and Interrelations, Part 3

103 Pages·2023·3.581 MB·English

by  Annette Froehlich

Southern Space Studies
Series Editor: Annette Froehlich
Annette Froehlich   Editor
Outer Space
and Popular
Culture
Influences and Interrelations, Part 3
Southern Space Studies
Series Editor
Annette Froehlich, SpaceLab, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
Associate Editor
Dirk Heinzmann, Bundeswehr Command and Staff College, Hamburg, Germany
Advisory Editors
Josef Aschbacher, European Space Agency, Paris, France
Rigobert Bayala, National Observatory of Sustainable Development,
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Carlos Caballero León, CP Consult, Lima, Peru
Guy Consolmagno, Vatican Observatory, Castel Gandolfo, Vatican City State
Juan de Dalmau, International Space University, Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France
Driss El Hadani, Royal Center for Remote Sensing of Morocco, Rabat, Morocco
El Hadi Gashut, Regional Center For Remote Sensing of North Africa States, Tunis, Tunisia
Ian Grosner, Brazilian Space Agency, Brasília/DF, Brazil
Michelle Hanlon, For All Moonkind, New Canaan, CT, USA
Torsten Kriening, SpaceWatch.Global GmbH, Berlin, Germany
Félix Clementino Menicocci, Argentinean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Buenos Aires,
Argentina
Sias Mostert, African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment, Muizenburg,
South Africa
Val Munsami, African Space Leadership Institute, Pretoria, South Africa
Greg Olsen, Entrepreneur-Astronaut, Princeton, NJ, USA
Temidayo Oniosun, Space in Africa, Lagos, Nigeria
Xavier Pasco, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Paris, France
Elvira Prado Alegre, Ibero-American Institute of Air and Space Law and Commercial
Aviation, Madrid, Spain
Fermín Romero Vázquez, Fundacion Acercandote al Universo, Mexico City, Mexico
Kai-Uwe Schrogl, International Institute of Space Law, Paris, France
Dominique Tilmans, YouSpace, Wellin, Belgium
Robert van Zyl, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Bellville, South Africa
The Southern Space Studies series presents analyses of space trends, market
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The volumes of the series are peer-reviewed.
Annette Froehlich
Editor
Outer Space and Popular
Culture
Influences and Interrelations, Part 3
Editor
Annette Froehlich
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, South Africa
ISSN 2523-3718 ISSN 2523-3726 (electronic)
Southern Space Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-25339-3 ISBN 978-3-031-25340-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25340-9
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Contents
Mexican Mars: Narrating Spatial Futures from the Margins ............. 1
Anne Warren Johnson
Jellyfish from Outer Space: Tentacular Creatures and Cosmic
Responsibility in Environmental Art and Pop Culture ................... 17
Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Anne Hemkendreis
Space Travel: Human Cosmic Hitchhiker Concept ....................... 33
Christoffel Kotze
Africa: Home of Space Art and Indigenous Astronomy .................. 67
Barbara Amelia King
v
Mexican Mars: Narrating Spatial
Futures from the Margins
Anne Warren Johnson
ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a series of events and encounters organized by the Mex-
ican space art and science collective Marsarchive.org between 2020 and 2022.
The workshops Imagining Martenochtitlan, Martenochtitlan: Myth, Rite and Site
and Mars in Guererro were developed with the goal of creating speculative
narratives and visual representations of imagined Mexican (“Neo-Tenochca”)
settlements on Mars. Focusing on the collaborative processes, national iconog-
raphy, and contemporary preoccupations from which the workshops emerged,
the text analyzes the ways in which these encounters and their products offer
alternative visions of human futures in outer space, in contrast to the neocolo-
nialist and extractivist proposals of representatives of space agencies and the
private space sector.
1 Marsarchive.org
In 2016, a few years after the creation of the Mexican Space Agency, the Inter-
national Astronautical Congress (IAC) was held in Guadalajara. Well-known
astrocapitalist Elon Musk gave the keynote speech, “Making Humans a Multi-
planetary Species,” in which he invoked the planet Mars as “possible…something
that we can do within our lifetimes.”1 He argued that humanity can follow one of
1 “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.” YouTube, uploaded by SpaceX, 27 September,
2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8 (all websites cited in this publication were last
accessed and verified on 26 July 2022).
B
A. W. Johnson ( )
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1
A. Froehlich (ed.), Outer Space and Popular Culture, Southern Space Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25340-9_1
2 A.W.Johnson
two paths: stay on Earth and, one day face extinction, or leave Earth and become
a space civilization and multiplanetary species. The second path, Musk insisted,
is the only way to survive. “I hope you all agree with me, yes?” The audience
yelled and clapped. The image of Mars appeared behind him, a red sphere filling
the screen. “This is what we want.” More cries and applause.
Musk spoke of his desire to construct a self-sustaining city on Mars, referenc-
ing Mars’ closeness to Earth and its geophysical characteristics, as well as the
changes that Mars would have to undergo for humans to be able to find water,
thicken its atmosphere, plant crops, and build a city. He explained how to achieve
this dream. Right now, he said, a voyage to Mars would cost ten billion dollars
per person. It would be difficult, but costs could be lowered through a series of
technological innovations. He explained the technical requirements of rockets and
ships, fuel composition and the infrastructure that would be necessary to main-
tain a Mars system. He presented a digital simulation scored by inspiring music,
demonstrating the how the SpaceX Mars rocket launch and landing would work.
The rocket’s design would be based on the Falcon rockets and Merlin motors,
and the ship would be based on the Dragon vehicles that already exist. At the
end of the presentation, the digital planet revolved, transforming itself from a red,
dessert sphere to a red, blue, and green sphere with an atmospheric halo indi-
cating its inhabitability. This last image, a disquieting hybrid of Mars and Earth,
accompanied Musk for the rest of his speech.
To sustain a civilization on Mars, Musk warned, we will need a population of
one million people. With a hundred people per trip, the quantity of cargo, passen-
gers and crew that will fit into the enormous rocket, it would take ten thousand
trips to fulfill this dream, and, he estimated, it would take about one hundred years.
Eventually, there will be “many ships…a thousand ships or more waiting in orbit,
so the Mars Colonial Fleet would take off en masse. A little like Battlestar Galac-
tica, if you’ve seen that thing. Good show.” And Musk considered that the cost of
a trip to Mars, including life support and the consumption of food, could end up
being less than one hundred thousand dollars. “It’s not just a dream, but something
that can be made real.”
Marcela Chao, museologist, and cultural promotor, saw the conference on
YouTube, and was captivated by Musk’s passion, if not his billionaire persona. In
2016, Chao was working in Mexico City at the Center of the Image on projects that
combined science, technology, and art. She founded the organization that would
later become Marsarchive.org2 with her friends and friends of friends as a way
of intervening artistically in the photographs generated by NASA’s Mars rovers,
but the project eventually expanded to include reflections on “the reactivated space
race” led by space agencies and the private sector. Just in that moment, Elon Musk
came to Mexico and, as Marcela recounts, “I got archive fever.”3 She decided
2 See the organization’s website, “Marsarchive.org: Vivir Marte desde la Tierra,”www.marsarchi
ve.org.
3 Interview with Marcela Chao, Amadís Ross and Juan Claudio Toledo, 1 December 2020.
MexicanMars:NarratingSpatialFuturesfromtheMargins 3
that Marsarchive.org would compile all existing information about Mars, like a
contemporary version of the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, to “gener-
ate accountability” because everything is changing so fast in the space industry
and, “how long before the millionaire gets bored, right?” She contacted various
space actors in Mexico, included the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), the Center
for Digital Culture (CDC), and the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC),4
and Marsarchive.org began to grow and expand. An interdisciplinary group formed
around Chao, made up of students and professionals in, among other fields, art,
literature, engineering, and astronomy. Between 2017 and 2018, Marsarchive.org
presented events such as the curatorial program MartePop, a Wikipedia editathon,
a series of projections of movies about Mars and a virtual reality exhibition. They
continued with the first edition of the Christmas Posadas marcianas, a series of
podcasts and La Bendita primavera marciana (“Blessed Martian Spring”) during
the annal celebrations of Yuri’s Night that commemorate Yuri Gagarin’s voyage to
space in 1961.
Some members of the group had more “scientific” perspectives, and so decided
to “go down another road,” while within the group, according to Marcela, “the
craziness kept going like we wanted it to.” The collective started to think about
other topics, like the passage of time on Mars. To celebrate the Martian new year,
which occurs every 687 days, they created the Martian Calendar, a collaborative
project led by Marcela and Juan Claudio Toledo, astrophysicist at the National
Autonomous University (UNAM). The dual calendar was meant to be a repre-
sentation of the Martian “Year 35” which took place between March 2019 and
February 2021 of the Gregorian calendar. It was illustrated by images of Mars
obtained by NASA rovers, curated by Marcela, and explanations of the areolog-
ical conditions of the planet written by Juan Claudio. The project was meant to
reflect on how, on the one hand, time is determined by our origins in the solar sys-
tem and how, on the other, time is a cultural construction influenced by political
and historical realities.
Martenochtitlan was born after a discussion between Marcela and Juan Claudio
about the possibility of founding a Mexican city on the site of the Mars landing
of the rover Curiosity and was visualized as a “Neo-Tenochca futurist meme.”5
They decided that the meme deserved further attention and began to develop a
workshop that would take up the possibilities of a Mexican inhabitation of Mars.
Would the first Mexican Martian city be built on a lakebed racked by earthquakes,
like the construction of Tenochtitlan and, later, Mexico City? And thinking about
4 The Mexican Space Agency (AEM; aem.gob.mx) was founded in 2012 as part of the Secretary of
Communication and Transportation; the Center for Digital Culture (CCD; centroculturadigital.mx)
is part of a project sponsored by the Mexican government to promote digitally mediated artistic
productions and disseminate technological and artistic knowledge. The Space Generation Advisory
Council (SGAC; spacegernation.org) is an international organization for young people interested
in participating in the space industry. They maintain an active group in Latin America.
5 “Tenochca” is the word for the inhabitants of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the site of present-
dayMexicoCity.
4 A.W.Johnson
Fig. 1 Codex “Martenochtitlan: Mito, Rito y Sitio”, creative commons
Elon Musk’s plans for Mars, should we terraform Mars or should we transform
ourselves?6
2 Imagining Martenochtitlan
In 2020, Marcela and Juan Claudio met up with their friend Amadís Ross, a
researcher at the National Institute of Fine Art and Literature (INBA) and expert
in science fiction. Until then, Marcela told me, everything they did with respect to
Mars was “universal,” but “really when I say universal, well, everything was very
American, you know?” For Marcela, this “universal” perspective would change
through her participation in the seminar Aesthetics of Science Fiction, organized
by the INBA’s National Center for Plastic Arts Research, Documentation, and
Information (CENIDAP), and coordinated by Amadís, who was convinced of the
importance of a decolonial view, and “creating science fiction from where you are.”
According to Marcela, this perspective was fundamental because marsarchive.org
was meant to imagine futures somewhere else, “although this future wasn’t realist,
I mean, one hundred percent scientific.” Amadís was inspired by the name Marcela
and Juan Claudio had given to their imaginary city because, “the name Tenochtit-
lan has great power in the Mexican imaginary…it touches the heart of Mexicans.”
The group is aware of the problems generated by focusing on the center of Mexico
and the Aztec image to the exclusion of other pre-Hispanic populations: it could
have been, they say, “Marte-Chichén Itzá.” But, as Amadís recounted, other names
wouldn’t have the same mythical or sonic force. “Martenochtitlan” opens the door
for an appropriation of the mythic symbolism of the nation’s center, allowing for
“dialoguing with the universe” and imagining new futures (Fig. 1).
They decided to present the workshop in three parts: in the first, coordinated
by Amadís, participants would work with the mythic aspects of the narrative to be
produced; in the second, they would develop the architecture and urban planning
of the imagined city; and finally, they would write up a social contract to guide
the Martenochcas in their new civilization. However, by the end of 2020, they had
only been able to fully develop the first part of the workshop, which was sponsored
by the UNAM’s Program for Art, Science and Technology (ACT). Around sixty
6 I was able to observe the second and third editions of the workshop. For the description of the
first edition, I rely on conversations with the organizers and access to the myth and codex.