FutureSpace Talk 14 | Ralo Mayer

Plots of Un·Earthing: Artistic Research on and through Storying Meteorites

Abstract

Despite recent legislation and commercial and scientific sample missions, Space Mining is still largely perceived as situated in some distant future. This presentation discusses findings from the artistic research project Plots of Un·Earthing, which suggests “mining the sky” already exists through human interactions with meteorites including scientific, commercial, and cultural practices. Through a performative and story-driven approach, I investigate how “meteorite cultures” display potential key aspects of future extraction and processing of resources on other celestial bodies—such as legal, economic, ecological and political issues—and how their storying can be employed to re-imagine our human relation to resources and environments on and off Earth. Sharing examples of such re-imagining, the talk will present a range of artistic and performative engagements with meteorites, meteorite hunting, and space law.

Bio

Ralo Mayer, PhD is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Vienna. Informed by the multivalent notion of plot and performative research, he examines objects and places from space exploration, science fiction, or everyday life, and translates his research into artistic storytelling. In 2023, Mayer contributed a chapter about his work on the closed ecosystem Biosphere 2 as experiment of un·Earthing to the Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space. Supported by a Disruptive Innovation postdoc grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Science Fund, he currently investigates meteorite cultures as pre-enactments of Space Mining.