WED, 1 December 2021
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana

In this talk the artist group IOCOSE discuss their most recent production around the NewSpace movement, composed of the video installations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021), and the image series The Fortune Teller (2020). The NewSpace movement produces immense economic, technological and discursive investments towards the private colonization of extra-terrestrial planets. The most involved and visible actors are Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), but there is an ever-growing number of related investment funds, technology consultants and start-ups, based for the most part in Silicon Valley. The movement opens up numerous questions related to the privatization of extra-terrestrial space and on the conditions of possibility of imaginaries linked to the future of humankind. NewSpace, as a concept, appears as a technological solution for a limited few, unlikely to be implemented within our life span, but capable of moving enormous capital in the very short term. IOCOSE explores the utopian promises surrounding the NewSpace movement and their inevitable failure, and asks what could be done with the traces left on our planet of this adventurous project.