Rocketing Imaginaries: Futurity and (Extra)Planetary Environments in The Visualities of Spaceflight

My project will investigate the visual histories of spaceflight, considering how these visualities shape collective imaginaries regarding societal, planetary and cosmic futures. Through centring visual analysis, my work addresses the often elided and multiple environmental histories of spaceflight. From the terrestrial lift-off of rocketry through orbital sojourns to their final Pacific splashdowns: spaceflight infrastructures span multiscalar and transnational territories, threading all together in a transplanetary ecology of technological processes. Prioritising archival material from European and U.S. space programmes, my project contends that these new techno-environmental entanglements might best be interrogated through their visual modes of representation.

Spaceflight visualities -- which include everything from paintings and digital renderings of speculative technologies to photography of (and from) space vehicles -- use the bombastic hypervisuality of space technologies to tell complex stories around how planet, cosmos and human destiny are increasingly intertwined. Rather than objective depiction or documentation, spaceflight visualities are composed of particular aesthetic refrains which trumpet technological progress in the space domain as linear and inevitable. As such, these visualities are deeply enmeshed within specific ideological, geopolitical and economic regimes of thought. And yet, despite the powerful role visualities play within understandings of spaceflight, a sustained interrogation of these infrastructural and cosmic aesthetics remain woefully overlooked and lacking. My highly interdisciplinary project is the first to implement a rigorous aesthetic analysis of spaceflight visualities, in order to parse and examine the ideological positions which become increasingly naturalised through the supposed neutrality of such images. Moreover, my project anticipates that spaceflight visualities necessitate new forms of aesthetic interrogation to be formulated, sociotechnically informed theoretical frameworks which can feedback into the arts and humanities. Finally, through my involvement with The Science Museum, my project will directly impact public discourse around the uses of spaceflight.

My project will build upon, and unite, three distinct critical fields: the environmental histories of spaceflight, aesthetic analysis and the generation of collective imaginaries. By prioritising the role aesthetics play in collective understandings of emerging technologies, my project acts as a form of redress for the consistent undervaluation of visualities and aesthetics in contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries. Embracing the possibilities opened by this direction of research, my project shall address the following research questions:

How do visualities both obscure and aestheticise the ecological consequences of spaceflight?

What are the historicities of spaceflight images and what role do these images play in the formation of contemporary (sociotechnical) imaginaries?

What role do aesthetics play in the generation, propagation and dissemination of particular forms of (extra)planetary futurity over others?

Images inform how we imagine, but they also make visible changes to how we see; how then do interrogations of spaceflight visualities necessitate the development of new frameworks for visual analysis of the sociotechnical?