Space Camp 2000 brought together a group of artists working out truths and fictions in a variety of exhibitions, events, media and disciplines from television to paintings, photography to performance, fiction to philosophy, and comics to theatre. Publication contributors include Kathy Acker, Ven Begamudré, David Collier, Colleen Cutschall, Shawna Dempsey & Lori Millan, FASTWÜRMS, The GALA Committee (Constance Penley and Jon Lapointe), Jennifer Hamilton and Louise K. Wilson, Anthony Kiendl, Neal McLeod, David Miller, Jeanne Randolph, and Gerri Ann Siwek.
Speculative fiction’s exploration of the “impossible” facilitates a broad range of imaginative possibilities. The impossible opens up dimensions of creative freedom and agency. To paraphrase musician and composer Sun Ra, “I am interested in the impossible because the possible has been tried and nothing changed.” During the 1950s, Sun Ra set out to impart his view of the galaxy. For almost forty years, he along with his Solar Myth Arkestra, explored the impossible through speculative compositions, poetry, drawings, fashion, and everyday life.
Space Camp’s narratives and fictions arose out of a desire to play with a multiplicity of contingent and speculative languages that could connect the present with the past, and with the future. Rather than seeking an already existing truth “out there,” through multiple, successive, and speculative evocations of the impossible, Space Camp proposed we might pursue a liberation of difference.
Above image: David M.C. Miller, 1998 (photogram made using cremation ash), selenium-toned fibre-based gelatin print from Night Series 50.0 x 40.0 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
