Merging speculative fiction, 3D worldbuilding, plant magic, artificial intelligence, and critiquing contemporary architectural proposals for the habitation of Mars, The Martian Word for World is Mother explores three Martian worlds with very different understandings of the Red Planet's future, and who gets to decide.
Working with historical and contemporary science-fiction, Donna Haraway's theories on the nonhuman, and emergent space economies as its narrative backbone, the project complicates and extends our relationship with the Red Planet. Building on Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, The Word for World is Forest, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it underscores the limiting aspects of our language of space exploration in imagining a future for Mars that does not pivot towards human settlement as the necessary default. Featuring a collaging of narratives and worlds across three planets - Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars - the project explores the political, ecological, economic, metaphysical, and linguistic parameters framing contemporary discussions of Mars.
Red Mars doesn't stray too far from what we already know - a billionaire tech despot proposes a carbon-neutral megacity nestled inside the cliffs of Tempe Terra, positing interstellar settlement as a knowledge project, and living on Mars as the logical salvation from a dying mother planet.
In Blue Mars, a multinational business conglomerate, Praxis, taps into Mars's emerging bio-infrastructure business, packaging clean air and water and selling it back to the highest bidder on an apocalyptic future Earth.
Green Mars merges Martian mythologies, plant magic, queer theory, and non-human language systems. Using Natural Language Processors (NLPs) and the Language AI GPT-3 to create a fictive language out of nonhuman and dying languages, it also makes connections between Artificial Intelligence and Alien Intelligence, and speculates on the possibility of knowledge systems that exist outside of human cosmologies.
The Martian Word for World is Mother is supported by the Goethe-Institut and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.
