Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the interaction between astronomical data and data-visualization. This interaction is illustrated through some speculative visual experiments which are assigned both as research subject and as research technique, showing the intrinsic speculative nature of these images.

Paper long abstract:

Built upon on-going ethnographic visual research on astronomical images, this presentation focuses on the interaction between astronomical data and data-visualization. This interaction is illustrated through some speculative visual experiments which are assigned both as research subject and as research technique, showing the intrinsic speculative nature of these images.

The astronomical images are the data-based visual representations of objects that are incredibly far away from direct human experience in space and time. This kind of an accentuation assigns astronomical images to exist at an intersection between science and art, information and aesthetics, the conceptual and the visual. Thus, astronomers combine empirical data and conceptual imagination throughout the process of data-visualization. This allocates astronomical images to be ontologically speculative, that is, they are rather ‘mental’ than ‘material’. Subsequently, the ‘mental’ and speculative nature of astronomical images prompts us to recursively use speculation both as a method and as an object of inquiry in anthropology.

Along the lines of experimental and multimodal anthropology, I created two speculative visual experimentations: “NASA CHAPEA Mission: Ground Control through Speculative Fiction” and “Speculative Futures: Asgardia Space Nation and the Space Child”. I will present these two speculative visual pieces along with my on-going research experimentation(s) with the aim of proposing a reflection on the pluriverse-in-the-making within the anthropology of outer space.

This research forms part of the ERC-Consolidator Grant “Visual Trust” (2021-2026, www.visualtrust.ub.edu).