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Paper short abstract

This paper showcases "All Worlds, All Times", a performance workshop that explores the unknowns at play across discovery processes of finding life beyond earth. Participatory play invites alternative imaginaries of space futures into dialogue

Paper long abstract

All Worlds, All Times is a performance workshop exploring plural futures for the discovery of life beyond earth and the unknowns at play across discovery processes. We propose participatory play as an STS method for engaging space histories and space futures otherwise.

The workshop builds on a research-creation workshop presented at 4S 2025 that examined the politics of earthly and unearthly media. Asking how speculative imaginaries reproduce marginalisation across human and more-than-human worlds, and how fascination with the extraterrestrial can come at the expense of the terrestrial. By foregrounding media as a site of contested truth, authority, and collective sense-making under conditions of uncertainty and misinformation, players investigate the nuances of speculative imagining.

Extending this approach, All Worlds, All Times invites participants into specific future scenarios in which communication, interpretation, and protocol are worked through collectively rather than imposed technocratically. Through improvisation, embodied decision-making, and collaborative world-building, the workshop opens questions of who gets to interpret the unknown, whose values shape space futures, and how alternative imaginaries might be rehearsed and disseminated publicly. In doing so, it positions creative practice not as supplement to theory, but as a speculative and political method for making more plural, relational, and more-than-human futures of outer space thinkable.