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

我的项目将调查太空飞行的视觉历史，考虑这些视觉如何塑造关于社会、行星和宇宙未来的集体想象。通过集中的视觉分析，我的工作解决了经常被忽略的航天和多重环境历史。从火箭的地面发射到轨道停留，再到最后的太平洋溅落：航天基础设施跨越多标量和跨国领土，在技术过程的跨行星生态中贯穿在一起。我的项目优先考虑了来自欧洲和美国太空计划的档案材料，我认为这些新的技术与环境的纠缠可能最好通过它们的视觉表现模式来拷问。航天视觉——包括从绘画和投机技术的数字效果图到太空飞行器的摄影——利用空间技术夸张的超视觉性来讲述关于地球、宇宙和人类命运如何日益交织在一起的复杂故事。太空飞行的视觉效果不是客观的描述或记录，而是由特定的美学元素组成，这些元素宣扬太空领域的技术进步是线性的和不可避免的。因此，这些视觉效果深深植根于特定的意识形态、地缘政治和经济思想体系中。然而，尽管视觉在理解太空飞行中发挥着强大的作用，但可悲的是，对这些基础设施和宇宙美学的持续质疑仍然被忽视和缺乏。我的高度跨学科的项目是第一个对航天视觉进行严格的美学分析的项目，目的是分析和审视通过这些图像的所谓中立性而日益自然化的意识形态立场。此外，我的项目预计，航天视觉需要制定新的审美讯问形式，社会技术知识的理论框架，可以反馈到艺术和人文学科。最后，通过我对科学博物馆的参与，我的项目将直接影响公众对太空飞行用途的讨论。我的项目将建立并结合三个截然不同的关键领域：太空飞行的环境史、美学分析和集体想象的产生。通过优先考虑美学在对新兴技术的集体理解中所起的作用，我的项目作为一种纠正当代社会技术想象中对视觉性和美学的一贯低估的形式。拥抱这个研究方向所带来的可能性，我的项目将解决以下研究问题：视觉是如何模糊和美化太空飞行的生态后果的？航天图像的历史性是什么？这些图像在当代（社会技术）想象的形成中扮演了什么角色？美学在特定形式的（外）行星未来的产生、传播和传播中扮演了什么角色？图像告诉我们如何想象，但它们也对我们的观察方式产生了明显的变化；那么，对太空飞行视觉性的询问如何使社会技术视觉分析的新框架的发展成为必要呢？

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?