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记忆。通过以视觉分析为中心，我的工作解决了经常被忽略的航天和多种环境的历史。从火箭的地面发射到轨道逗留，再到它们最后在太平洋的溅落：航天基础设施跨越多尺度和跨国领域，在跨行星的技术过程生态中相互交织。优先考虑来自欧洲和美国太空计划的档案材料，我的项目认为，这些新的技术-环境纠缠可能最好通过他们的视觉表现方式来询问。太空飞行的视觉效果--包括从绘画和投机技术的数字渲染到太空飞行器的摄影--利用太空技术的夸张的超视觉性来讲述地球、宇宙和人类命运如何日益交织在一起的复杂故事。而不是客观的描述或文件，航天视觉是由特定的审美抑制，其中喇叭技术进步在空间领域的线性和不可避免的。因此，这些视觉效果深深地融入了特定的意识形态、地缘政治和经济思想体系。然而，尽管视觉在理解太空飞行中发挥着强大的作用，但对这些基础设施和宇宙美学的持续质疑仍然被严重忽视和缺乏。我的高度跨学科的项目是第一个对太空飞行视觉效果进行严格的美学分析，以解析和检查通过这种图像的假定中立性变得越来越自然的意识形态立场。此外，我的项目预计，太空飞行的视觉需要新形式的美学审讯制定，社会技术的理论框架，可以反馈到艺术和人文。最后，通过我与科学博物馆的合作，我的项目将直接影响围绕航天用途的公众话语。我的项目将建立在三个不同的关键领域之上：太空飞行的环境历史，美学分析和集体主义的产生。通过优先考虑美学在新兴技术的集体理解中所起的作用，我的项目作为对当代社会技术领域中视觉和美学的一贯低估的一种矫正形式。拥抱这一研究方向所开辟的可能性，我的项目将解决以下研究问题：视觉如何模糊和审美化航天飞行的生态后果？航天图像的历史性是什么？这些图像在当代（社会技术）博物馆的形成中发挥着什么作用？美学在特定形式的（额外的）行星未来的产生、传播和传播中扮演什么样的角色？图像告诉我们如何想象，但它们也使我们如何看到可见的变化;那么，如何询问太空飞行视觉需要开发新的框架来进行社会技术的视觉分析？

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?