Description (en)
Through artistic research and storytelling, this PhD thesis investigates the manifold relations between speculative, planned and realized scenarios of human life in outer space and human realities on Earth. By establishing the concept of Space Un·Settlements questions the ostensibly neutral term space settlement, which is often adopted against the overtly charged “space colonization”. Furthermore, the notion of unsettlement invokes perspectives of hauntology and the “unheimlich”, whose common translation uncanny drops the original’s reference to home. Space Un·Settlements points towards the familiar/strange relationship between Earth (our planetary home) and space (as outside/other) in the past, present and future, in factual reality and speculative fabulation. Via a series of interconnected works, the thesis departs from objects like the closed ecological system experiment of Biosphere 2, Herman Potočnik Noordung’s rotating space station design in the context of 1920s Vienna, and a Metabolist tower built for Expo’70 in Osaka which inspired an ecological spaceship in a Science Fiction movie. Based on essayistic approaches, the resulting films, installations, performative settings, and texts explore ecological concepts as entanglements of space and Earth, the situatedness of ideas for life in space within social contexts on Earth, and the influence of space narratives on ongoing political, economic, and cultural transformations in space as on Earth. At the same time, the thesis reflects on possible limits and responsibilities of speculative storytelling, the role of serendipity in research and storytelling, and explores the multivalent notion of plot as an alternative to site and site-specifity in art and artistic research. Through its exploration of past and future Space Un·Settlements, and a reflection of artistic investigation of past futures, the thesis proposes Un·Earthing as a conceptual framework to examine transformations of humans and human cultures (and possibly nonhuman species) when leaving planet Earth.