Abstract

With the current renewed space race to the moon, space art, which is understood here as a variation of the Art & Technology movement, is also increasingly garnering attention. In the 1960s and 1970s, the artists Newton Harrison, Joe Davis, and Paulo Bruscky each independently pursued the goal of artificially creating a widely visible aurora. With their idea of placing floating colored light into the sky, they ventured into areas for which science could not yet offer any ready-made technologies. It was not clear whether – or how – these light phenomena could be created. The artists’ aspirations provoked considerable political resistance as well. The scale of the projects immediately revealed an ecological relevance. It was not until years later that a theoretical, new materialist framework was established that increased understanding of what these works explored.

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