Jessica A Robinson
She/Her/They/Them
OurSpace
OurSpace is my MFA thesis project. It is an interactive and immersive story world that uses design fiction to address the ethical concerns of space exploration and associated emerging technologies. In an interactive exhibition, participants are thematically invited to use a digital mobile interface as “employees of a company,” which guides them through the space by means of “work assignments.” This guide threads together digital and material creations including mixed reality, gaming, sculpture, animation, and paintings into a greater story world, enabling an ontological and immanent experience of the future. This approach to story world building creates an engaging design fiction that maximizes the discursive space for ethical questioning and ability to unfold in the now. It problematizes current western configurations of human (space) exploration such as militarization, territorialization, anthropocentrism, and commercialization and simultaneously encourages the audience to consider new materialist-informed alternatives and be active accountable contributors to the new space age.
What is OurSpace?
Ethical Concerns of Outer Space Exploration
Arrival of capitalism in outer space calls for a actionable steps of accountability regarding who, what, where, why, and when.
Need For Change
Outer space exploration and thereby Earth exploration should be rooted in the areas that emerge between science and culture. Either or is not enough.
Design Fiction Story World
"OurSpace" consists of multiple "prototypes" that create discursive space within and between.
Four Main "Prototypes"
OurSpace has four "prototypes" in which discursive space emerges. But the story world format allows for endless prototype expansions from various practitioners and mediums.
A board game for the deliberation of uncertain artificial intelligence (AI) scenarios.
Mars Rust Refinery
A miniature Arduino powered model.
Sexuality and Strange Things in Space Gallery
A gallery for the things we "try not to talk about."
On matters of space exploration...
"It follows no specific or clear order of reproduction, communicating, or sustaining itself, in a constant state of dynamism, differing, and becoming. There is a vast array of aesthetic qualities found in many forms of matter that may only be discovered and appreciated through observation rather than control. For this reason, the Creature motivates mindful exploration through outer space, careful of matters we try to control or define such as terraforming planets or augmenting the human. This is not to say these matters should not be conducted, but that we partake in them with accountability much like when we attentively carry the Creature Staff."