Who Knows?: The Universe as Technospace

Abstract

This text looks at changing relationships between humans and technology in practices of producing and sharing knowledge about the universe, and does so from the perspective of contemporary media theory (Hansen, Ernst, Timeto, and others). The starting point is Eric Joris’ artistic research that was part of the Spectacular Astronomy project and that works towards the development of a twenty-first century planetarium. Joris’ planetarium stages encounters with the universe that draw attention to the entanglement of humans and technology in historical and contemporary practices of producing and sharing knowledge about the universe, and to parallels between the development of the interaction between scientists and their instruments in the history of astronomy and the interaction between humans and media technology. Technological developments put humans in situations in which they, and their modes of perceiving, are increasingly implicated in larger apparatuses that to a considerable extent operate outside their awareness and in ways to which they have no direct access. This engenders a shift in hierarchy between humans and technologies that starts already in the nineteenth century and in relation to analog technology, and is intensified with the rise of digital and networked technology. These developments foreground the similarities between the modes of operating of media technology and of scientific instruments of measurement and suggest an understanding of the universe as we know it as what Timeto (in Diffractive Technospaces. A Feminist Approach tot he Mediations of Space and Representation. Surrey: Ashgate, 2016, p. 1) proposes to term technospace: a dynamic and contingent formation whose emergence cannot be separated from the generativity of the mediations that traverse it.