Out Of This World: An Exoplanetary Workshop
Proposal Type
Workshop
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
The workshop investigates how scientific constraints can productively defamiliarize human experience and create new frameworks for creativity and expression. Participants will produce original work while considering broader questions about environment, perception, and cultural formation in speculative contexts, and how the arts, sciences, and technology inform each other in relational multiplicities. This generative workshop explores how astronomical data from confirmed exoplanets can generate new poetic forms and linguistic constraints. Participants will examine how exoplanetary conditions can shape language, metaphor, and narrative structure. We'll develop from writing exercises that respond to non-terrestrial physical parameters: alternative light spectra, gravitational variations, and atmospheric compositions.
Please note: this is not a science fiction workshop. Kuipers develops speculative art tools and creative methods from SETI's real world scientific data, and Storss develops real space and lunar activations and approaches from speculative off-world imaginings.
Out Of This World: An Exoplanetary Workshop
Narratives & Worlds
The workshop investigates how scientific constraints can productively defamiliarize human experience and create new frameworks for creativity and expression. Participants will produce original work while considering broader questions about environment, perception, and cultural formation in speculative contexts, and how the arts, sciences, and technology inform each other in relational multiplicities. This generative workshop explores how astronomical data from confirmed exoplanets can generate new poetic forms and linguistic constraints. Participants will examine how exoplanetary conditions can shape language, metaphor, and narrative structure. We'll develop from writing exercises that respond to non-terrestrial physical parameters: alternative light spectra, gravitational variations, and atmospheric compositions.
Please note: this is not a science fiction workshop. Kuipers develops speculative art tools and creative methods from SETI's real world scientific data, and Storss develops real space and lunar activations and approaches from speculative off-world imaginings.
Bio
Monica Storss is a lunar punk poet and researcher-theorist working with emerging technologies for human flourishing. She has a poetry installation on Earth’s moon, and her landmark project, The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine achieved lunar deployment in 2021 as part of a larger lunar payload delivery. Her work ideates lunar and solar punk approaches for making speculative ideas real and actionable. She has edited, curated, published, exhibited, and advocated for emerging technology art forms, poetics, and pedagogies at MIT, UC Davis, Intel, HP Inc, and in cultural spaces globally. She is in kinship with JPL, CalTech, MIT, and UNM with her space-humanities work, and is a doctoral student researcher at Northeastern University.
Bart Kuipers: Bart Kuipers is an Artist-In-Residence at SETI. An internationally recognized artist whose work spans technology, art, and poetry. His residency at the SETI Institute allows him to explore themes of deep time, cosmic scales, and the search for meaning in the universe. He is the unexpected product of master degrees in computer science and creative writing. His fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines in The Netherlands and The United States, and his screenplays have been produced for Dutch and German public television. He is based in Berlin.