Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the cosmos as a site of utopic projection through artistic practices that (re)imagine figures of subjectivity through pluralist and non–universalizing perspectives. It presents an alternative to the scientific objectivity that frames techno-scientific visual output.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes an approach towards the material space of the cosmos through subjective perspectives as an alternative to the scientific objectivity that frames both the development of technologies and its visual output. Thinking with Paul B. Preciado's planetary thinking and its relation to alternate subjectivities in his compilation of writings titled, An Apartment on Uranus, I refer to contemporary artworks that approach the site of the cosmos as utopian alternatives to socio-political marginalization on earth. This includes looking at contemporary artworks that engage with for example, agencies of temporality by the collaborative duo, Black Quantum Futurism and their work titled "Black Space Agency" (2018), imagining environmental colonialism by Daisy Alexandra Ginsberg's in her artwork titled, "The Wilding of Mars" and relations between collective politics and the individual in Ilya Kabakov's, "The Man Who Flew into Space From His Apartment" (1982). This cultural analysis looks at how the site of the cosmos is generative of reimagined and redefined forms of subjectivity that generate from and against socio-political and capitalist marginalization and against the backdrop of techno-scientific visual output that have been historically framed by logics of objectivity. This inquiry is framed by the questions, how have the cosmos been a site in which subjectivity expresses itself (as well as already existing as a material space from which we were all formed)? How can the technological output of visualising outer space be used by artists to create visions that figure subjectivity in ways that are pluralist and non–universalizing?