Week 9

 This week’s materials completely shifted the way I think about space not just as a place “out there,” but as something that exists on every scale, from a strand of DNA to entire galaxies. One of the most mind-blowing pieces we looked at was the short film Powers of Ten. It starts with a picnic in Chicago and zooms out through the atmosphere, solar system, and galaxy, then dives inward until we’re deep inside a proton. That visual journey made me realize how scale is everything. Our bodies, cities, and even the universe are all part of a continuum we usually don’t think about.

Brian Holmes’s essay “Coded Utopia” brought that same curiosity down to Earth but in a totally different way. His writing about Makrolab, a mobile research unit designed by artist Marko Peljhan, was intense but super fascinating. This isn’t a lab in the traditional sense it’s also a performance, a home, and an artwork all at once. I was really drawn to how the people living in Makrolab became part of the experiment. Instead of just studying data, they study each other, their surroundings, and how isolation and tech shape daily life. It reminded me that scientific research isn’t always about results it’s also about experience and process.

The lecture also opened up a ton of ideas, especially around nanotech and outer space. I didn’t know buckyballs, tiny carbon molecules, were found in space! It’s wild to think that materials like this might have arrived on Earth through meteorites. Even crazier is the idea of using carbon nanostructures to build something like a space elevator, which was once just a sci-fi idea and is now being explored seriously by scientists. It shows how science fiction can actually lead to real innovation.

On that note, I found the Leonardo Space Art Working Group’s mission really beautiful. This group of artists and scientists believes that cultural imagination is essential to space exploration and I totally agree. Roger Malina says that humans didn’t just build rockets and go to space; we dreamed it first. Artists were imagining zero-gravity, moon bases, and cosmic dances long before NASA existed. That really stuck with me: that the way we dream about space shapes what we actually do in space. Altogether, these materials reminded me that space isn’t just a scientific frontier it’s a cultural one too. Tools like telescopes and satellites are important, but so are stories, metaphors, and experiments like Makrolab that let us live differently. This week made me realize that space art isn’t about decoration it’s about expanding how we see ourselves in the universe.

Works Cited:

Eames, Charles, and Ray Eames. Powers of Ten. YouTube, uploaded by Eames Office, 4 Mar. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0. Accessed 28 May 2025.

Holmes, Brian. “Coded Utopia: Makrolab, or the Art of Transition.” Makery, 25 July 2017, www.makery.info/en/2017/07/25/marko-peljhan-lutopie-materialisee-du-makrolab-12/. Accessed 28 May 2025.

“NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope Detects Buckyballs in Space.” NASA, 22 July 2010, www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20100722.html. Accessed 28 May 2025.

“Leonardo Space Art Working Group.” Plasma Physics Group, UCLA, plasma.physics.ucla.edu/leonardo/. Accessed 28 May 2025.

“KSEVT – Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies.” KSEVT, www.ksevt.eu. Accessed 28 May 2025.