 Welcome everybody, thank you for joining. My name is Andres Martinez, I'm the editorial director of Future Tense. Future Tense is a partnership between New America, our host this evening, Arizona State University, and Slate Magazine. We are a citizen's guide to the future. We're both a section on the Slate website where you can read content on a daily basis that looks at the implications for society of emerging technologies. Then we have a lot of forums and discussions like this evening's where we like bringing people together around provocative questions. You can follow us on Twitter at Future Tense now. Some upcoming events that we are hosting at Future Tense on November 8th, we are posing the question why we should imagine solar flares taking down space stations. So I hope that's intriguing enough. And then on the 14th of November, we are doing an event on the history of the future looking at past predictions of where we are today and what we can learn from those predictions. Just in terms of housekeeping items, please silence your cell phones. I haven't done that myself, but I will as soon as I sit down. During the Q&A, please wait for a microphone and identify yourself. And with that, I really am excited for this conversation and tonight's subject matter of the role the arts play in allowing technology to build a better future. And we have a fantastic panel tonight. And I'm just going to hand things off by introducing our moderator for the evening, Eric Malinsky. Eric is a reporter at WNYC Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson and he hosts a podcast for Panoply about sci-fi and other fantasy genres called Imaginary Worlds. I mentioned Eric before we came on stage that I was listening earlier today to the latest podcast where he looks at the origins of the haunted mansion at Disneyland. And it was fascinating having been at Disneyland a couple of times at various stages of my life. I didn't realize that Walt Disney himself was confused as to whether he wanted the experience to be humorous or scary and that if you've been to the haunted mansion, that confusion kind of comes across. So I highly recommend Imaginary Worlds. And Eric, thank you so much for being our moderator. Thanks. So today we're going to be discussing technology and need the arts to build a better future. And we're an interesting point in space exploration where NASA seems to always be facing egocentric questions as to whether where is this all going and is this all worth the money. At the same time you've got billionaires like Yvonne Maas that are making space accessible to the super rich or anybody who has access. And the artists here with me to my left are looking at why not make space accessible to everybody? Why not democratize space? And how can we have a feeling when we look up at the stars that it belongs to all of us? So first on my immediate left is Juan Jose Diaz Infante. He's the director of the Mexican Space Collective, a group of artists that builds and launches nanosatellites as a platform for art projects. He also runs a satellite school to teach non-engineers how to build their own space technology. Devarra Strachan is a conceptual artist based in New York, originally from the Bahamas. The most famous piece, A Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, he transported two and a half ton block of ice from the Arctic to his childhood with your elementary school, elementary school. He's also trained as a cosmonaut in Star City, Russia, which I really want to talk to you about, that influenced his multimedia work. Orthostatic tolerance, it might not be such a bad idea if I never went home. So thank you guys for coming and we're going to start by looking at some images of their work and then we're going to talk amongst ourselves and we'll open it up for Q&A. So now let's see whether I know how to use this. This is very exciting. Don't believe I do. Is there any way, as we discuss technology in the future? That part I got. There we go. All right. Just the right button. All right, so first thing we want to discuss is this little guy over here. This is a... Okay, this is a... Cool. I was just saying, I've been vinging on Dr. Hu lately and I feel like this is like a... There's some wonderful explanation with David Tennant. Tell me about Ulysses. Tell me in the Mexican space collective, what was the idea behind all of that and I assume that was an initial sketch approach. It was the original, the exploring. My problem was that I became 50. So I woke up one morning and I realized the future was not there. So I had been watching all these Kubrick films from 2001 and suddenly that, for me, it was... All that future was a promise. So I had a middle-aged crisis in which I decided either to buy a convertible or start building a satellite. And I made the wrong choice and started building a satellite. So it was just this re-engineering of my life. And of course I couldn't pretend to be a scientist because I'm a photographer. So it's very difficult to lie in that direction. So it had to be a piece of art. So I thought, you know, if you are going to be lying to people, if you make it a poetic and if you make it an artistic mission, then also Mexico is not a very scientifically prone place. So we decided to make it an artistic and poetic piece. That's how it started. So who are the Mexican space collectors? Well, originally it started as a concert because you cannot be the author of a satellite. So the idea of working something technologically is always a team effort. And we do not know how to work as a team. We think that we work as a team but we work in an environment of competition. So the idea is that the collective and the problems of the collective have to be worked around. So I designed a collective without knowing. And I decided that this collective that had no one yet would be the one that would make the satellite because it was like the right authorship that needed. And from there I started inviting people that was needed for the project. And I started with 11 artists because that's the number of a soccer team. And I decided that if you are trying to engage into a team effort and a world problem and a world trying to live as a collective, FIFA has more members than the UN. So I would go with FIFA. So did you, I mean, you know, we're talking earlier. I mean, I've seen videos on YouTube where somebody just like hooks their iPhone to rock it and shoots it up in the space. I mean, was it as easy as that? Or did you have to get official permission? Well, it's the same problem as poetry or painting is when you're right from a museum and you have a person that goes to the painting and says, I can do that. But it's a different way to mention how you say it. I can do that. It's a totally different approach to poetry. And the problem is it is as easy as that. But when you are a citizen that wakes up one morning and decides to launch a satellite it became an international issue. Because no one had done it in that way. A lot of people joined into a scientific community. They joined into a university. And I knew the other way around. I asked the university to join me to do this thing. So the conversation was, it's as easy as you say it. It's just the way you converse with the people. But was this one of the things where it just took a really, really long time and you were just keeping getting referred to? Will you need permission from this person and this person kind of thing? Well, no, my original problem was my Visa card. So I was buying components from China. And my card got canceled. So I called Visa the same way that you call and the people of Visa said your credit has been canceled. And they ask why and they say suspicious behavior. So I said, well, exactly what does that mean? I mean, how do I clear myself from suspicious behavior? Okay, you are building a satellite and we got on, our algorithm has gotten on that you are buying technology that cannot be exported to Mexico. And in Mexico no one, there's no NASA. No one launches anything from Mexico. You are not a university. You are not a research group. So therefore this is suspicious behavior. And you have to call the Department of Defense right here in Pennsylvania. You had to call the US Department of Defense to launch a nano satellite in Mexico. Yeah, there is no Department of Defense of Mexico. But why would the US Department of Defense have pure jurisdiction? Because I was exporting technology to Mexico that shouldn't be exported to Mexico. Wow. And I had to swear in the phone that I was not going to share my poetry with an enemy of the United States. So I called Captain John Smith at the Pentagon. His name really was John Smith. No, of course not. But for this purposes we called him John Smith. He says, excuse me Captain, but I'm trying to launch a satellite and it seems that I need permission from you. And John Smith said, son, I need to know what your satellite is going to be doing. And when I told him, well, it's poetry. And you could hear him telling everyone in the room, we have a poet. How do you do the manifest of a poetry satellite? And that conversation lasted three months before I could get a $1 cell exported from San Diego to Mexico City. And from there onward I had to use contraband. Really? Yeah, but a very bad ombre tells me. I love these drawings too. They look like something out of a Buck Rogers. Very da Vinci. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Absolutely. Same, Buck Rogers da Vinci. Yeah, they're very close. Very, very close. And so where do these components come from exactly? You're saying some of them actually came from like Radio Shack? Yes. When you're launching things at 300 kilometers, you can buy them anywhere. More on it. Because the mission only lasts four months. And then you were also saying, you know, you said a couple times, Mexico, we don't launch anything. Like, would this, I mean, what, symbolically, what did this mean to you? And, you know, starting with the midlife crisis all the way up to, you know, the nation. Well, in the aspirations and hopes and dreams. It was very strange that the Department of Defense had to give you permission to bring cells that come in any toy. I mean, I could have bought the toy, bring it, take the cells out, put them into my satellite. And on the other hand, you start realizing what exactly is happening in countries that are not developed. Imaginary of what the countries that have not reached development yet. And how the global conversation has to be happening. So the idea of Ulysses was to be a little bit of a sputnik. You know, when the sputnik was launched, it was a basketball. And it had a radio, the same as this one. And it went for 23 days. And suddenly the whole world was in a panic. And I'm trying to create that panic a few years ago. There's a Mexican satellite in the sky. All right. So what we have here, tell us what we're looking at right now. Okay. That's the Book Fair in Guadalajara, which is the largest book fair in Mexico. And I got permission to launch a nanosatellite to the threat sphere from there. And it was a very complicated launch. Even though it seems very simple to send it in a balloon. We had to stop air traffic of Guadalajara. Guadalajara is like the second largest city in Mexico. So we were trying to explain the people at the control tower that we were in the middle of the city with a lot of air traffic. And we were going to launch this satellite up from a book fair in a homage to Jules Verde. And the 100th anniversary of the trip, the man to the moon. I mean, from Earth to the moon, a novel. So basically, the idea was launching from a book fair. It was the idea of there. And of course we got a bunch of scientists to help us to do this triposphere mission. And they lost the satellite. So that was the last time we ever saw that one. So you've launched two so far? Yes. Two. When it goes up, how do you just simply know, well, we've, you know, it's supposed to go in this direction. We hope it has. I mean, can you keep track of it? No, we were relying on the scientists to know that, you know, to buy a GPS. But suddenly scientists have this complicated mind in which they do things complicated because they are complicated people. And so they lost it because they wanted to lose it. I mean, they never thought that we would do it. The day that, okay, guys, we have to launch it, no one was ready for the launch. So the way that you catch that one up is there is a program in Google and you put how much helium you use, how big the balloon is, where you are, your geography, and we will tell you where it lands. It's relatively simple if you know that. Now the problem with this one is if you haven't done it before or if you're going to launch something to space, there has to be a 15-meter distance between the parachute and the balloon because when it blows up the balloon, it wraps the parachute and it just brings it down in a faster mode. So here, my friends and scientists didn't know that it was from the 15 meters between the parachute and the balloon. I'm funny with any kind of artwork that is, that deals with un-traditional materials. Very often the artist has to learn all this kind of scientific, technological, mechanical things he didn't know before. This must be interesting in all the facts that you certainly know about space, longings in the space. Well, the thing is you start learning a lot because a lot of people have too much knowledge. So as soon as you tell them, I want to launch a satellite, people look at you and say, it's very complicated because you have million dollars, we need to buy a new lab, we have to hire NASA. It's not making very big, it has to be very good. So there's no way that it can be done. And basically what I did is okay, there has to be a simpler way to do it. So I've been coming up with a simpler solution to it. But sometimes you forget and you lose your satellite. Well, let's go to Tavares. I have this bigger thematic question too, but I want to talk to both of you guys about that. So let's start with some of Tavares in this year. Now you, you grew up in Bahamas, you've always been interested in space and it seems like deep sea and Arctic exploration as well. What did that mean to you growing up? I think for me it was two things. I think one was feeling a deep sense of isolation and the other was pure boredom, which is a very important ingredient. There's been a lot of studies that boredom actually, that we're not as bored as we used to be because of all of our devices and we're potentially less creative because of it. There was no device. Tell me, this is called, let's see my mother's house from the moon, right? Tell me about this piece. So I was, I think around 2009, I believe, I was invited to be an artist and resident at MIT. During this time, I was working with the List Center, which is MIT's art space and the curator at the time, Jane Farver, invited me to come to a visit and see if I was interested in working with any of the labs at MIT and I made a seven-page bucket list of what I would want to do and fortunately all of the labs responded very well and so this was one that I collaborated with, the 3D Systems Microfabrication Lab and basically we built this 22-micron house in the laboratory at MIT and the idea was when you were looking at it in the exhibition space, where you were standing would represent the moon. And is that a physical scale? Is that actually your mother's house? Or a representation of it? That's a good question. If you look at your driver's license and you see your face on it, is that actually your face? This is an old Pablo Picasso question. Is your face that size? Yeah. This is famous quite a bit, Gershwin Stein said to him, Pablo, the painting doesn't look like me and he said it will someday. And so this is Invisible Rocket. Tell me about this. Yeah, so a group of family and friends of mine got together and we decided that we wanted to try and get as many of the ingredients that were familiar to us into space. And so on the islands we have a lot of salt and sand, which are the ingredients for glass making, which is something that I'm familiar with. And salt, again for fuel and sugar. So I started devising these plants to produce these rockets that would be made from these materials. You know, I think one of the things that goes missing in the Bahamas and the islands in general is, you know, this is long historical narrative that these places are empty in desolate. Another devoid of any sort of future potential. And from the 1500s to almost to the present, that's kind of the pervading narrative. So, you know, we were talking about resources in Mexico, scientific resources in Mexico I think, there's sort of a parallel conversation about how do we engage questions of manufacturing and production in these sort of scientific modalities and places that are quote-unquote been labeled as desolate. Yeah, which I think is bringing us to, what is that from the time you, but this is Blasthoff, right? Yeah. Tell me about Blasthoff. Is it where you launched and crashed the rocket? We lost a bunch, we like lost several rockets. I feel out of it, I haven't lost or launched a rocket. And I think one of the interesting things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is the intersection between the sort of poetic space, picture making, basically lying, and this sort of alternate reality of the sort of physical reality that the sort of science lives within, where an object in science is a result of sort of empirical investigation and how those things can actually have a relationship with each other. And I think this Bahamas-based agency is interested in investigating this sort of new approach to thinking about the past, present and future of how we think about making things. And so then how did Blasthoff play out as a piece, exactly? That's a question I'm still working out, to be honest with you. I don't know that, I try not to think about duration. It's very boring to think about for me. So you're still, I didn't realize you're still a part of, you're still a working part of it. Yeah, I think everything I'm working on is a work in progress. Yeah, and this is the part I'm dying to talk to you about. You train as a cosmonaut at Star City. Is this you underwater? That's me underwater, yeah. What inspired you to do that? I won't tell you which one is me, though. Is that a cosmonaut? Is that a Russian secret? Sorry, can you repeat that question? So yeah, what inspired you to do this? I was interested in exploring these sort of unfamiliar terrains and disrupting the conventions of who was expected to be interested in this kind of material, so that maybe in 25 years, 50 years, 100 years, there's a whole host of explorers in places that are sort of branded as places that will not produce explorers. What's funny, you having to deal with the U.S. Department of Defense, and then it's a similar thing in terms of who owns space or who gets to control what goes up there. Obviously Russia, the other big space power. So it's interesting that it's parallel there. But what was that like, did you just call them up or send them an email and say, I'd like to train as a cosmonaut, I'm an artist? That's exactly right. In a way, the system in Russia is a lot, the level of bureaucracy is a lot less than, say, working with institutions like NASA. And also, little secret guys, if you tell someone that you're an artist, they most likely respond to you. And it's really that simple. You're not that great. No, we're not that great. And in fact, I think this non-threatening characteristic is interesting, specifically because I think between this sort of poetic space and this empirical evidence-based space is actually creativity, daydreaming. And I think no matter what field you're in, no level of innovation can come without that. Otherwise, you're just repeating experiments over and over again if you're a scientist and if you're an artist, you're just making the same painting. So how is this experience... I mean, as I was asked what you expected to get out of it, but I'm also curious, were you surprised by the experience? Were there things about it that were just not what you expected to be going completely open-ended in terms of what you thought it was going to be like? Yeah, I think a huge part of my visual knowledge of space has to do with NASA, because, you know, proximity. And I think NASA's done a really good job of branding the whole enterprise of space in a way that makes it seem woefully difficult and extremely inaccessible. And I think one of the things that I discovered in Russia was, for example, Star City is also a military base. Which means when you pull up to the facility, there are children running around. There's a small garden and farm. And it's filled with everyday working people. And it's quite beautiful to see, because it's not this sort of separated facility where, you know, if you don't have a red coat... a white coat on with a massive patch, you couldn't get in. And it was quite astonishing to see, I think, it was the most revealing component for me of how human the whole experience was, believe it or not. Yeah, I could definitely see that. So then how does this influence ortho-tastic tolerance, the piece that I assume is still in progress then? Yeah, I think so, ortho-static tolerance is the discomfort a person feels when he or she returns to home, to Earth's surface. And I really love that idea that, you know, returning home makes you incredibly sick. And so this body of work, this comfort with familiarity was sort of driving this creative process for me. And it was sort of underwriting the strangeness that I had always felt as a child growing up being interested in this kind of material. How does one reconcile that? How does one feel alone and being interested in something and still sort of barrel through it tend to making, hopefully, producing something? I like that idea. So now one thing you guys both have in common is we talked about earlier, Bahamas, Mexico or countries you don't really associate with space. What does it mean for communities and countries and people that have access to space that have not previously had access to space? Talk to me about why that is so important to both of you. It was because Milan from said, small step for a man, a big leap for mankind. But when I showed up, I said I'm mankind. NASA said you cannot come in. You need to be accompanied by someone from NASA if you want to wander around Cape Canaveral. I've always had a really base level belief that every human being is talented at something. And I think it's just a matter of each individual figuring out what that thing is. And I think when you look at these under represented, under exposed groups of people through this technology and through these ideas and through this realm, I think there's the potential for these tools and tools of talent. And I think in a way the sort of singular direction that exists a lot of times in the scientific process, it misses so much because it's devoid of a certain level of diversity in every direction. And so it's interesting even talking to scientists about their creative process, their creative process because it's like a wave, the human creative process. But ultimately, like I said earlier, if you're not interested in creativity, then you're just a human experiment. And so I think this is an insane potential for the next great engineer or the next great chemist to come from a place that is completely isolated and devoid of physical resources more than is likely for that person to come from somewhere that is rich. My podcast usually, I mean I talk to a lot of writers, film makers. I don't talk with a lot of artists. I mean it's funny because science fiction, we're so used to the space being given to us through movies, television, novels. What does art bring to that conversation? What can visual artists bring to that conversation? That's different. In terms of the future of science. I think in terms of just sort of like showing people this is space, this is how we should imagine space and imagine ourselves in space. Well, it depends a lot on what you call an artist. Who is left here? He's an artist. His space album is on there. Or Frank Sinatra is an artist. And I think the artist has been put away from the social environment. Whenever you draw that organization charts to know how to make a hospital there's never an artist in that organization chart. Or in school or whatever. The artist is always wandering somewhere there. And I think what is very important is to bring the art back to the organization chart. The social organization chart because I think artists are like a catalyst of things. They are creators of metaphors. So the actual ownership of your house is a metaphor because it's a piece of great paper. And reality is a metaphor that is being created by a very bad poet. So we need better poets generating reality. I wonder too is there something a little bit more democratic in terms of anyone. You can declare yourself an artist and create art with whatever materials you want as opposed to a filmmaker. You have to go through a system or if you're a novelist you have to get published by some giant, you know, you can try to solve published but you know there's a marketplace. And I think maybe is it the fact that you don't have a marketplace. You have to worry about in terms of your ideas that can be more, you know, allow more creativity. That's what I think that we are outside of the organization. So it's good and bad in that sense. I think it's important to recognize that. I think there are layers of art, like art worlds. And so the conventional art world, the art world that maybe you think of it is New York, Paris, LA, et cetera. And if you think of that world, that world is as conservative as any other small community. And I think it's important to also for us to consider that. There's a certain smallness that goes along with that and I think that's a great misconception that people have that it's this free flowing open minded space and it's actually completely the opposite. That's true. And also it's a world that's just as dependent on you know, is Hollywood. I mean are either of you fans of science fiction or are you ever influenced, is any science fiction ever influenced you by real astronauts or astronauts? Well, my problem is that I was born in 1961. So basically the space race and all the narrative of reaching space and the Apollo program, it was very important in TV. We did not need science fiction because it was happening. You had the Sputnik going on and the Russians going on. And that was pretty amazing on itself, everything that was happening. I think later on or I don't know, you had all this Star Trek happening in a very parallel way. It was because you were interested in space you wanted to see science fiction. More than you were interested in science fiction and therefore you were interested in the space program. I think the capacity of wondering or surprise was the other way around. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean I was born just a decade later but for me growing up it was the Challenger Space Shuttle going up again. I mean we had of course it blew up and that was obviously very, very tragic but there was a sense of monotony to the program overall and maybe you didn't know where it was going. The Star Wars messed it up a lot because people are not amazed at things since they watched the first Star Wars. So basically there's some science fiction that has harm to us a lot. That's interesting. Because the special effects everything seems possible just by going to the special effects company. Yeah. You go to Pixar, Pixar does it for you. I mean to some extent do you feel with your work do you really want to help inspire or send them wonder again to people? I think you could need a sense of future. A future? More than wonder. I think you need to think that there is hope and we're constructing something not immediacy. I think young generations are very immediate to get the reward and basically they think that the world is going to end tomorrow so they need to get the gratification very quick. Yeah. My generation did not have I don't know you're younger than me. I think what's inspiring potentially inspiring about this whole space project in general is that it's really faith based as much as it's underwritten by science we can probably name all of the humans that have ever entered space which means it's deeply reliant on storytelling and that storytelling is supremely important all of the film that's made about space and all of the poems and all of the songs movements, you know social movements, political movements all are based on this idea that only probably under a few hundred people have experienced. So I think this is really sort of a rich idea because I think within this idea there's this potential for this kind of investment in the future and then wonder if we can somehow unlock that because we all sort of believe to a certain extent. Yeah. I don't think it possibly that could have been part of the inspiration for you. I know for a lot of people when Armstrong did land on the moon there was a sense of how long this would have been in the plane and how many people they didn't even get to live to see that but had been part of the beginning of that process and so I could see why there's a sense of we lost that in the sense of investment. So I think that it's just to try to understand what the mathematics are to launch a rocket and to think that someone thought of it in 1903 and Shilkovsky had the equation to launch something out of space and if you see the sketches of Shilkovsky they are exactly the same one that Kubrick used in the movie. So it's a very interesting relationship that someone in 1903 was helping the story board of 1969 that was 2001 Space Odyssey. So I think we need we need to get back someone that is thinking forward and generating the mathematics of something that needs to happen in a hundred years. Well what's next that you've launched to these so far? Where is this project that keeps going here? Well now I've become addicted to space mission. So I last year I did bounce from the moon. So you what? Last year was the 400th anniversary the 400th commemoration of the death of Cervantes and I was thinking a lot the message that Earth should have to intelligent virtual life and I decided that if a human being were to say hello I come in peace with it, come out. So I was trying to work out which should be the message from Earth and not the Bible because I think it would work to just read the Bible with any other planet. So I said Don Quixote was a pretty good message to bounce from the moon and I got a radio station to bounce it off the moon to get it back to Earth and I did also some transitions to other stars and it was very interesting because I mean the fact of someone of someone that goes mad because he read too many novels of shit always and he's fighting whatever is good and noble I think it really defines what the world is. We try hard we are mad we accept that reality is mad and that's why we put on with everyday reality but we are here because of madness not because we are smart people So I think if an alien were to see or to try to understand Don Quixote and come to Earth it would match perfectly on Earth. On that note I'd love to transition to some questions Do we have any questions? Hi, I'm going to be a student of space policy at Ram One of the main issues I've had with people who are working on space exploration are people like Elon Musk talk about it as colonization and colonizing Mars and I have a problem with this language because of the history of colonization globally and thanks that it makes space inaccessible so I was wondering if you could talk about framing and how important it is for you to think about how to frame space for people in the future I think framing is quite significant and if you I had the privilege of yesterday coming from the scientific conference and it's extremely difficult to go through presentation after presentation of charts and graphs and a complete denial of personhood so you hear all these ideas and all these theories and theorems about what they're proposing to do but you don't ever hear how it connects to the why and I think that's ultimately the question so if we're going to go to Mars and you're right if the only reason we're going there is to colonize it then that makes that endeavor completely ridiculous and so yeah I think this is where the two sort of sides of the spectrum the empirical science experience in object making as truth versus lying, art making creative reverie should collide and when they collide I think there's a lot more optimistic sort of view of the future and it's not let's go to Mars and colonize it it's how do we make the universe better I wrote a little text about how lawyers in Berkeley are studying law to know who owns space and I was wondering if in another planet there's other lawyers discussing who owns space and by the time we reach there we are already part of someone there so once you extrapolate things to a cosmic level you suddenly the framing becomes very strange because you have to reorganize a lot of thoughts, concepts ways of seeing people and what is very interesting is when you bring it back to your world not necessarily Mars but basically when we are searching for intelligent life and we do not know how to deal with ourselves so you can have a mathematical equation to meet other civilization but you should be applying here to meet your neighbor or to meet another nation or Brexit whatever situation we are having we cannot work as collective that in the west outer space was having for a long time yes I always thought that was interesting there's a general perception that artists and scientists are kind of pulling out of it and I believe that they are probably more related and then we will be really into a knowledge my question for you is what are we losing by enforcing this perception or misperception and as an artist would you like to see a replacement I think the comment about madness is appropriate in response to your question I think we have been invested in a process a practice deeply enough and engaged enough we are all working on the same problem we are all trying to solve the same problem I think we are just coming at it in different ways and I think ultimately we are I think our biggest challenge as a species is we have extreme communication issues and I think from them I think we all need to be a lot more multi-lingual and when I said it I mean I need to understand enough about what you are doing I need to understand enough about what I am doing so we can actually talk to each other and once we start doing more of that then I think we can start getting at the real we can start solving real problems as opposed to kind of working out our own frustrations separately I think there is a lot of the problem that could be solved teaching people photography because we are not able to see most of our visual education comes from I don't know from where because as a child you are asked to read and memorize and any illustration on a book has to do with a badly written text so basically you just read something that you could not understand and you have to see the diagram but you cannot also understand it's a badly drawn diagram and that's the way you reach university so I think right now we are having a bad transition because phones are cameras and people think that bad is photography and it's actually transmission is broadcasting it's not photography and it is very important to learn how to generate to be able to see, to observe because you need to train the eye and 70% of your brain is for seeing so basically if you do not learn to see first of all part of your brain is not working and it's only through seeing the compassion for the other person or that you could so I'm really redesigning the human race I'm basically going to elementary school and teaching photography as an interface for people to actually see and decoding what the eye is seeing because I think we have problems at many levels in the conversation and the way we see the others by the way Laurie Anderson was an resident at NASA I think about 12 years ago Laurie Anderson is a performance artist I did a live show about it it was very cool I thought in Brooklyn I don't know what it was out there anyway but if you look that up I think she joked she would be one and only in NASA I work at NASA I've done a lot with citizen science and prize competitions and getting the public more involved in our projects I wrote my doctoral dissertation a couple of years ago on the space shuttle program and how NASA shifted from the Apollo program to the shuttle program in terms of how it involved people in different ways and how it redefined public engagement I'm not sure if you're familiar but NASA had a non-scientific payload program which was actually encouraged by artists that actually started by artists wanting to fly their pieces of work into space it also had the teacher in space program it was supposed to be a bigger citizen in space program both of those projects ended up getting curtailed with the Challenger disaster and never were resurrected in quite the same form afterward for a variety of reasons but I'm wondering now given your experiences and thank you for sharing them what you think the agencies NASA could be doing to bring people into the fold in a bigger and better way I think so when I first left the Bahamas I was almost embarrassed to be from such a small place because being an artist represented this long sort of historical trajectory of artists that had come from Paris in America and so how does one find room how does one find that space and so it was I saw it initially as this huge huge disadvantage being from this tiny island and I think that now it's an amazing advantage and I think the question is not necessarily what can NASA do the question is what can individuals do and how can NASA inspire individuals to think differently about space exploration and how can NASA say to people that we don't own space exploration and I think that weight of ownership and that historical narrative is a part of what I think a lot of people may struggle with so I don't know if I answered your question but I feel like it's it's an extremely existential question like I think we're moving away I think we're in some ways moving away from that model into something else I have certain observations about I saw all the directors of the space agency last year at the IAC convention and the problem is that you have NASA Roscosmos China and China doesn't even make eye contact the guy of China just said we have done 98 missions and there's someone a very fat man translating behind him into English and then you have the European the European space and I think the way things are divided you cannot conquer space so there's a need of talking to the Chinese and the Chinese they don't even tell you when they send the rockets and there's been near misses to the International Space Station and things like that there are so little basic talking that I think you need to call the citizens or the artists or just citizen science that could bring together somehow the Chinese NASA Brazil that is now doing some satellites I mean you really need to open the channels of communications beyond politics because things become highly politicized so there's no discourse there's an emptiness of discourse so everything is 98 missions and on the other hand the private industry that is coming along with Elon Musk and Blue Origin I have my problems why they are doing it because I have a suspicion that is pretty much like the internet bubble that was put together and could you bring a great capital wanting to put together and then the bubble burst and I'm not very sure I need to go deeper there but I saw Elon Musk presenting his project to Mars and his dates for Mars and it's just not possible and whatever he's delivering because he wants to load fuel in orbit and I want to see that happening it will take 10 years to do that successfully so I'm trying to put together what it is possible to get the new boundaries and you need NASA to think of space as China India Russia and you need to bring the virtues of each attitude of but it cannot be defense of each country to block any development of rockets I mean there has to be a conversation among all the all the world because if not basically what you do is never get anywhere you are chasing your own tail I think we have time for one more question we can do the last questions I'm Victor Rogers also known as Slankston Hughes I'm a poet and I work with the organization out of Baltimore literary organization and when I'm not doing that I'm a humongous trekking and so I was like poetry and space this is literally my two loves colliding but I think my question is kind of a two part question inspired by some of what's been said one I think in the modern era of science you see a lot more room where science and spirituality and creativity have more common ground and space for collaboration where in past eras it was almost unheard of it's like this is science, this is real this is spirituality, this is things people imagine you can't prove it and where now there's been a lot of science coming forward that's kind of been like yes you can actually see where these two things aren't just connected but they're the same thing and kind of saying that also in that we realize that we're all connected would that not make it easier to collaborate as a species in general in trying to explore beyond our own planet we talk to a lot of astronauts one of the things they always talk about there was like a spiritual experience for them when all the science was over is seeing earth from space for the first time and the biggest thing they notice is the lines that we have on maps are not actually there on the planet there are aliens really out there and they come and they like you know these people these guys actually think that there are lines where there's not and they don't they think that they're different from each other they're crazy, let's not bother with them I don't know maybe if they heard Don Quilty bounce off the moon they might stop for a minute but just wondering what do you think about how in the modern era of quantum physics and stuff there was a cross-pollination between spirituality and scientific research and how that relates to the ability for humankind to make an even larger leap and kind of realizing that working together is a better result getter than like you say all the different factions being split up and not really getting anywhere okay well you see the whole thing is a problem semantics or grammar of language because when you try to talk to a nanotechnologist or you try to talk with an engineer that is really focusing on a problem to try to get space and you come and you say hello I'm an artist it's just they ask for margaritas they have a hard time seeing where you are serious about it so basically in my research I am trying to make up like a new type of career called like engineering in art or art engineering in the sense that you need to bring language together but the words mean the same because when you're in a space the basic thing is the mission and the mission has a problem of language because even engineer of communication has a problem with the engineer of power and has a problem with the engineer that is in the earth base and they have trouble communicating in a basic mission so I took a course in mission so you have to broaden the concept of mission to become a global thing to understand that the formality of the language how you use the language is the capacity for artists and engineers and a lot of people to work together but it's a thing of writing and reading and learning how to read someone I think there's an underwritten sort of non-spoken hierarchy that develops when we're very young through education and through how we teach subjects and how we create hierarchies and at a certain point visual thinking is devalued and so all the questions about communication obviously re-enter the conversation again how can we be more equipped to speak to one another if from the minute you enter a school system you're taught how to speak different languages and never to speak to each other in those languages but I think from the early stages art really has to be seen as a uniter and not a divider and not the thing that you do the past time before you go to do math I think the great Temple Grandin I don't know if you guys know who she is but she talks all the time about visual thinking and there's so many talented students in the country and the world who can't get into certain programs because they don't know how to do algebra because their brains are not wired to work that way so what are we going to do with all those kids I think the communication the fact that the two things communication the other thing is how do we create how do we disrupt the hierarchy how does engineering become as important as painting as important as monofabrication etc etc and in order for us to be able to speak to one another there needs to be an even an even playing field I think we're out of time unfortunately but thank you guys so much this is fascinating, very inspiring too the remiss in mentioning at the outset was that we really would love for you all to linger and have another refreshment and let's continue the conversation amongst ourselves but thank you again and thank you for coming