suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
The Working-Group on Adaptive Systems: In recent decades, space exploration has been the heroic imperative of humankind, but this was not always the case. . . .
The first Earthlings in space were dogs, monkeys, and rabbits. Offering the opportunity to explore space back to nonhumans reveals new opportunities, risks, and rewards. Would an animal already adapted for life in a weightless medium not be better suited for free fall? What would an intelligent, curious, nonhuman mammal with a twitter account want to see and do in high Earth orbit and beyond?
The Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency is an open world speculative research project that proposes a network of robotic and biological systems for exploring the solar system, tied together by exchanges in the material and online attention economies. One set of automated probes searches the asteroid belt for resources, drifting in the solar wind like giant flowers. Another set, made from modified classic spacecraft, uses its manufacturing and fabrication capacity to shape those resources. Together they build and nurture the habitats for animals and robots, while the whole process can be followed on social media from Earth, all mediated by servers on the Moon.
Each habitat’s form is partly determined by the means of its manufacture. Some are made additively, from streams of stock material printed and woven together. Some are made “subtractively,” hollowed out from the inside by the removal of material. Others are melted by reflected heat and cast by explosive molding into their final shape. The Lazy River is a habitat for chickens and manatees, modeled on south Florida. It has a sevenfold symmetry, formed from the deconstruction of a source rock into its component materials, then extruded with a 3D printer and woven together, with a large river around the middle, and windows fore and aft that receive reflected sunlight.
sP: What or who influenced this project?
The Working-Group on Adaptive Systems: Greg Lynn FORM’s Embryologic House; ORDOS100; Rachel Armstrong / Black Sky Thinking; and Gerard O’Neill’s space colonies from the 1970s.
sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?:
The Working-Group on Adaptive Systems: Reading: Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire; The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Space Settlements: a Design Study; Detlef Mertins, Modernity Unbound; Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio, an Asteroid Novel; and Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence. Listening to: a lot of Baltimore slow-rave, mostly—Moss of Aura; Co-La; Phork; Sprayer; and CEX. Watching: David Attenborough (writer), The Life of Mammals.
sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
The Working-Group on Adaptive Systems: Cosmo Design Factory, AKOAKI, Dash Marshall, and Erin Besler.