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Paper short abstract

Based on an analysis of the exhibition “Planet Eden” and other archival materials, the presentation will address various forms of techno-imagination, alternative visions of possible futures, and the clash among technocracy, socialist cosmism, and socialist utopianism in Czechoslovakia.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates alternative techno-imaginaries in socialist Czechoslovakia, asking what visions of the future were possible – and what democratic potentials they carried or foreclosed. Drawing on an analysis of the exhibition “Planet Eden / The World of Tomorrow in Socialist Czechoslovakia 1948–1978” and other archival materials, the paper traces a shift from enthusiastic utopian thinking and visions of the "ideal man" (Sputnik/Gagarin) toward the rationalized ambitions of an "ideal technocratic system" (first cosmonaut Remek). Rather than treating these as failed or obsolete futures, I argue they remain analytically and politically generative: alternative imaginaries oriented not only toward an unrealized future, but also toward past visions of utopian time-spaces. To recover these layered temporalities, the paper draws on several analytical frameworks: futurology as a distinct practice embedded in the scientific and technological revolution; the exhibition as heterotopia and heterochronia (Groys, 2009, 2018; Bryant & Knight, 2019); Ssorin-Chaikov's (2006) concept of multi-temporality – understanding how different temporal orientations coexist and intersect; and contemporary approaches to time, temporality, and the future (Godhe & Goode, 2018). Speculative fiction and worlding (Davison-Vecchione & Seeger, 2021; Wolf-Meyer, 2019) serve as key analytical lenses, particularly through science fiction films, novels, and visual art from the 1960s to the 1980s. These materials reveal how socialist cosmism and fantasies of space colonization produced imagined worlds where technologies of power consistently crowded out visions of radical democracy – a tension that speaks directly to the question of what space futures could have been otherwise, and for whom.