2012. Art, media, and cosmology: Visualizing our place and destiny in the cosmos

2012

Doomsday scenarios. They proliferate in our culture, from economics to ecology, theology to technology, biology to cosmology, James Bond to Slavoj Zizek, Plato's Atlantis to Lars von Trier's Melancholia. With creativity and critical insight, Barry Vacker shows why apocalyptic memes replicate and have built-in survival advantages. He also explains how the doomsdays reveal the deeper challenges facing human existence — the philosophical apocalypse effected by our lack of cosmic meaning in the vast universe. Have we really embraced our true existence on Spaceship Earth floating in the cosmos of the new millennium? Our calendars say we have passed the year 2000, but have we really entered the new millennium? The End of the World — Again offers an original, exciting, and (for some) terrifying critique of culture in 2012 and beyond. Available in high quality paperback via Amazon.

2017

Now available in August 2018, the complete book. Inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, this book presents an entirely new space philosophy for the human species: based in science, aesthetics, ecology, and planetary cooperation. Blurb inside cover: "Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, 'floating in a most peculiar way', Barry Vacker seems to contemplate Planet Earth through the porthole of a spacecraft. Via critiques of the Apollo program and films like 2001 and Interstellar, Barry offers us a unique opportunity to step back and think of the contradictions of space exploration and our contemporary society. Barry shows we live in a 'post-Apollo' culture torn between a frenetic race towards ever more scientific-technological progress and a just as powerful fall-back into the cultural ideologies of tribal ages of the past. For those who can embrace their non-centrality and possible meaninglessness in a majestic universe, yet yearn for a shared destiny in a sane planetary civilization, Specter of the Monolith is a wonderful and inspiring work." — Carine and Elisabeth Krecke (internationally renowned artists). Available in high-quality paperback in Amazon and Barnes & Noble; available in Kindle and Apple iBook.

Telematics and Informatics, 2013

Is Facebook just television by other means? Yes. Are social media an existential response to space telescopes? Yes. Why? Humans have long sought to map their place in the cosmos and then situate their selves at the center of the universe. These patterns are displayed at three radically different sites — the Sun Dagger in Chaco Canyon, the Hubble Space Telescope, and social media and Facebook. Drawing from Marshall McLuhan, this article theorizes the parallels and reversals in these sites, where cosmological discoveries of the expanding universe have been countered by technological innovations involving electronic screens, such that social media counters space telescopes, cyberspace counters outer space, and Facebook counters Hubble. Perhaps the “revolution” of social media merely parallels other cultural reversals, all of which seek to return humans to the center of the universe, when we are the center of nothing. And this desire and delusion to be at the center of everything lies at the heart of contemporary issues facing the global civilization.

First published in The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space. Editors: James S Ormrod and Peter Dickens. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, January 2016. In this book chapter, I explore how artists shape our imaginaries of outer space and why this is important to the future of space activities and exploration. In the first part, I chart the construction of a ‘space imaginary’ from both Soviet and Western perspectives, drawing on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth century art and literature, and argue that this had a direct impact on shaping the space exploration programmes of both nations up to the space race and the Apollo programme. I reflect on how the notion of progress and the ‘avantgarde’ crossed both modern art and space exploration, and on how the space programme inspired and influenced artists in the 1950s and 1960s. This art history then sets a conceptual framework for my discussion of the interplay of contemporary art and outer space today, in which I highlight the role of experimentation and innovation, from the avant-garde to contemporary experimental art, and artists’ sociopolitical critique from Afrofuturism to present-day critical art. I explore the work of a number of contemporary artists who address topics relating to space operations and bring out significant themes. These themes include reflections on the utopian ‘grand narratives’ of space exploration, experiments with the technologies of space (sometimes to critique the politics of space) and exploration of notions of colonisation and territorialisation of space. The works I discuss are drawn from the visual arts but vary widely in approach, including tactical, experimental, poetic, provocative and fantastical engagements with space exploration and activities; however, all the works in some way push ideas and knowledge into the public domain.

PhD Dissertation, 2015

The aim of this dissertation is to explore and compare the impact of Russian and American Cosmism on the representation of space exploration in selected 20th century American and Soviet space art works in the context of both nations’ culture and literature of the period. The source material are 200 works of American (100) and Soviet (100) space art (1944-1991) which become subject to visual content analysis whose purpose is to examine the relation between the chief assumptions of Russian and American Cosmism and the image of space exploration constructed by American and Soviet artists. The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 attempts to define and present various views on Russian Cosmism, including its impact on the development of Soviet cosmonautics and space age ideology as well as selected aspects of 20th century culture related to or depicting the space programme’s ventures. Chapter 2 presents the core premises of the concept of Harrison's American Cosmism (2013), an extension of Harris's space ethos (1992), and discusses its impact on selected aspects of 20th century U.S. culture surrounding the national space efforts. Chapter 3 outlines the history and the principal generic characteristics of American and Soviet space art in the context of 20th century culture, literature as well as the major trends in space research and exploration pursued by both nations. Chapter 4 presents the primary assumptions of the research methodology utilized in the analysis and the chief research results of the study of American and Russian space art regarding the main thesis of this work.

This essay offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission's Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space. Building on the work of Dennis Cosgrove and Donna Haraway, as well as historical evidence from the U.N. Environmental Summit in Stockholm in 1972, the essay explores how the attempt to depict Anthropos as a unitary geophysical agent resurrects the appeal to the Whole Earth environmentalism of the 1970s without attending to the U.S. imperialist and racist connotations of the disembodied " god trick " found in these extraterrestrial photographs. As evidenced already in the 1950s at the landmark Man and Nature conference at Princeton and in the wildlife documentaries of Bernhard and Michael Grzimek, moreover, the first decades of the Great Acceleration witnessed the growing use of aerial images to chart the " disappearance of the outside " and to advocate for wilderness areas in the Global South as a " cultural heritage of mankind. " The confluence of geophysical tipping points, universalist history, and political struggle over decolonization resulted in eco-images that subsumed all parts of the globe—most especially Africa—into a doomsday narrative of human profligacy that lost sight of a kaleidoscopic patchwork of cultural landscapes. Fractal topographies, by contrast, serve as more effective indices of the recursive layering found in digital representations such as Google Earth and help us to stretch our historical imagination and cultural criticism into scale-dependent and multi-agentic realms that lie beyond the Apollonian visions of the late Holocene.

Adam Mickiewicz University Press, 2016

The aim of this book is to explore and compare the impact of Russian and American Cosmism on the representation of space exploration in selected 20th century American and Soviet space art works in the context of both nations' culture and literature of the period. The source material are 200 works of American (100) and Soviet (100) space art (1944-1991) which become subject to visual content analysis whose purpose is to examine the relation between the chief assumptions of Russian and American Cosmism and the image of space exploration constructed by American and Soviet artists. The research results obtained from the study have suggested that while the investigated representation of space exploration in the Soviet works can reflect approximately 70% of primary assumptions of Russian Cosmism, its depiction in the U.S. images seems to conceptualize approximately 80% of American Cosmism’s chief tenets.

Martin Heidegger characterized the modern world as the “age of the world picture,” an era when the world became conquered as a picture or representation set fully and clearly before our gaze. In the 1960s, the first images of the Earth from space delivered a glimpse of a world picture that was global and ecological, but also suggested humanity’s domination both of the earth (today) and of outer space (tomorrow). Fifty years later, we have not colonized other planets, but we might speak instead of an age of the world motion picture, an era when our colonization extends to imaginary planets, like the Pandora of the blockbuster film Avatar (2009) and where we see our world and ourselves in turbulent and uncontrollable motion on screens around the globe. The moving image has been with us a little over a century and in that time the world has arguably come to move faster and faster all around us. For Gilles Deleuze it was cinema that provided the greatest resource for reviving our lost “belief in this world.” This chapter asks how cinema is faring today, on the cusp of the digital era, in supporting “belief in this world” and in the universe that sustains it. I examine five films made since 1968. The year in which we received the first images of the Earth from space: 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1973), Contact (1997), The Tree of Life (2011) and Melancholia (2011). Drawing on the semiotics of C. S. Pierce, I examine how images of the Earth in space have “moved” their viewers and how their use in these films facilitates new forms of global identity built on new emotional and spiritual geographies.

Journal of Big History , 2019

Astrobiology is the field of science devoted to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. It is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating results from multiple fields of science, and in this respect has strong synergies with 'big history'. I argue that big history and astrobiology are both acting to widen human perspectives in intellectually and socially beneficial directions, especially by enhancing public awareness of cosmic and evolutionary worldviews. I will further argue that these perspectives have important implications for the social and political organisation of humanity, including the eventual political unification of our planet. Astrobiology and big history are also concerned with the future of humanity, and I will argue that this future will be culturally and intellectually enriched if it includes the exploration of the universe around us.