spaceXile
Where I imagined a company that sends prisoners to space.
2016
spaceXile is a fictional corporation established in a post-capital punishment future. The main objective of the company is to send former death-row inmates to space missions to keep them separate from society as well as providing free labor for exploration and experiments on human inhabitation in outer space. The prisoners deployed by the company are called Astro-prisoners. The project uses design fiction and speculative design to speculate the events of this fictional story and design the objects associated with it.
Space exploration and social punishment, though seemingly unrelated, share an important property and that is their existence in our images of the future. This may possibly bring them into a common ground. Thinking about fictional scenarios of punishment in the context of outer space inhabitation emerges serious issues and problems that should be projected and addressed not merely from a problem-solving point of view but from a provoking one.
The outcome of the project is performed in three acts. The first act of the performance shows events from the perspective of the designer. The idea is that the company spaceXile and its partners are sponsoring a study and work of architecture design for their yet to launch spaceXile MARS program. In this act work of architecture including drawings, models, diagrams, and renderings were used as props and the sponsored student represents his work for a committee including the sponsor’s representatives.
The remainder of the performance (acts II and III) focus on the spectacle and storytelling aspects of the project, mainly through the lens of a reality television show that the company will broadcast on earth showing the development of their missions.
