Interesting event on Monday March 21st at New School/Parson’s Center for Transformative Media organized by Ed Keller and Ben Woodard, bringing together a whole host of artists, architects, critics, designers, geographers, political thinkers, and philosophers (including Amanda Beech, Kai Bosworth, Benjamin Bratton, Geoff Manaugh and myself amongst others) to think about the issues around the development of capitalism beyond the planet.
Post Planetary Capital Symposium
Monday, March 24, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 9:30 PM (EDT)
Schedule of panels TBA
Wollman Hall 66 West 12th Street 5th floor New York, NY
Free and open to the public. Seating is limited-please register:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/post-planetary-capital-symposium-tickets-10521234295
As the dull glow of nationalism and cold war politics has faded from governmental space programs it is little surprise that space exploration has undergone widespread privatization.
Yet it is only recently that potentially massive profitability has accelerated off-planet projects, replacing narrower and perhaps unrealistic dreams of space tourism with asteroid mining (purportedly a multi-trillion dollar industry) and long term Mars colonization. Such projects present an odd combination of new technologies (especially advanced robotics) and lower cost older technologies (rocket propulsion) deployed in unfamiliar and lawless territory.
While much has been said regarding the internal limits of capital, much yet remains to be said about how capitalist imperatives can be taken off-world, questioning whether capital[ism] has external limits as it begins to spread across the solar system and out into space. Is the fact that asteroid mining extends an old logic of environmental degradation rendered moot by its non-terrestrial location? Does off-world colonization by non-governmental entities lay troubling ground work for the advent of mega-corporations and unregulatable capitalism?
Furthermore, the complicity between capitalist expansion and space exploration which centers upon large-scale collective action potentially questions stock oppositions between capital and ecological betterment, technological progression and radical politics, as well as space travel and non-national collectivity. This one day symposium aims to address the potential strategies and claims surrounding these issues.
– Ben Woodard, Ed Keller
PARTICIPANTS
Julieta Aranda [artist / editor of eflux journal]
Amanda Beech [CalArts]
Kai Bosworth [UMN]
Benjamin H. Bratton [DGP/UCSD]
Ed Keller [CTM/Parsons]
Deneb Kozikoski [Columbia]
Carla Leitao [RPI/Pratt]
Geoff Manaugh [Gizmodo/BLDGBLOG]
Rory Rowan [Wageningen University, The Netherlands ]
Keith Tilford [New School]
Ken Wark [New School]
Ben Woodard [University of Western Ontario]
Kazys Varnelis [Columbia Univ. GSAPP]
Additional speakers TBA
