Anthropologist Denis Sivkov will talk about techno-utopian flight projects and amateur aeronautics.
Space amateurs are a kind of “hidden figures” striving to “touch the stars” and make a decent contribution to the study and exploration of space without significant support from either the state or the commercial sector. Relying on informal connections and local nodes of the discourse network, amateurs spend their free time to make space accessible to ordinary people, absolutely for free.
Using historical, ethnographic, and artistic material, such as painting, photography, and documentary film, the speaker will explain how the process of scaling is carried out in the techno-utopia of amateur projects through the (re)construction of imaginary and material tensions between different scales—large and small, local and global, close and distant, between striving skyward and attachment to the Earth.
The lecture will be held within the framework of the public program accompanying Tomás Saraceno’s installation Moving Atmospheres.
