Chapter 10. Planet B

Installation

The assumption of Elon Musk that by 2050 one million people will live on Mars triggered me to imagine the kind of future he is trying to create. This is how Planet B was born at the end of 2019.

Planet B is the project questioning the ethics of space exploration and design under capitalism. Its goal is to find and expose old colonial patterns that still exist both in visual communication and in the exploration of space. This project aims to contribute to the Decolonizing Design Movement by projecting outdated design standards to the pessimistically painted design-fictional future.

The name “Planet B” is a wordplay referring to Mars being proposed as a replacement for Earth, in other words, our plan B. The final form of it is an installation with a diverse range of digital and analog graphic elements. At the center of the installation designed with the help of design fiction lies a diegetic prototype, a design artifact of its time: the brand of the corporation colonizing Mars. The brand is represented through digital and printed appearances and is surrounded by the narrative of other objects.

The setting of the installation plays an important role in the narrative as well. The time this scene takes place in October 2050, exactly 30 years from the publishing of this thesis. Its supposed location is in the USA. And it is not accidental. SpaceX is the first example of how, during Obama’s administration, space became a place for the successful collaboration of the government with the private sector in America, which opens similar opportunities for other companies in the industry.56

Planet B overview

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

In my project, I am speculating on a future, in which humanity gave up on Earth and spent all the resources on space exploration. Environmental conditions became almost impossible for humans to live in, natural disasters were happening more and more frequently. However, scientists came up with the appropriate technological solution to reach Mars and colonize it, making it the only home. There occurred the problem of the capitalistic world: not everyone has enough budget to actually save their lives.

The installation itself shows a corner of a Caltech student’s room in Los Angeles, California. We see his desk and a chair where he spends most of the time at home. The owner of the place is not revealed evidently but his presence clearly felt like he just left a few minutes ago. He is a 24 years old lowincome engineering student who won the Red Card lottery, a Martian analog of the US’s Green Card lottery. Now the winner can save himself and move to Mars. And this is what he is going to do. But this decision was the hardest one of his life. He has to leave his family and his closest ones on Earth and hope that some of them win the lottery as well in the years to come. All due to the financial inability of the biggest part of the population to actually buy a ticket. The corner of the room in this situation represents the mental state of the student literally cornered by the circumstances. He is definitely experiencing a lot of different feelings, but the most remarkable one is an unfamiliar homesickness on a multiplanetary scale, which has never been felt before by any of us.

In this project, branding and content, marketing instruments themselves, show the ridiculousness of the existence of a postcolonial capitalistic world in the future of design and space exploration. Sarcastically portraying the exact opposite of the future that we strive for, Planet B makes obvious that the current status quo has to change. But the emotional part of the installation is equally important. While perceiving the installation, the viewers may be laughing in the beginning, but going deeper into the meaning of the work and experiencing the narrative, as well as finding hidden connections creates a melancholic aftertaste. I think that exactly these emotions force us to ask the main question: is this really the future that we want?

Planet B details

© Vasilisa Aristarkhova

Website

I believe it is important to look critically to the future that awaits us in order to be able to correct it in advance. If we do not want any pessimistic scenario to happen, we must act right now. Therefore, I wish more people to know about this project. One of my goals in Planet B was to popularize critique of space exploration and present the problem to a wider audience. For this purpose, I developed a website-documentation of Planet B. The webpage increases the accessibility of the project, that was physically presented just once in the university.

The Planet B website contains not only photos of the whole installation but also detailed reviews of each graphic prop presented there accompanied by an explanatory text, as well as some additional materials. The theoretical background of the work – the present thesis – is also openly available on the page. Having the project documented in a web-form would also help to distribute it in the future through digital channels such as social media and to draw more attention to it. It helps to examine the installation more deeply and to communicate the problem.

Planet B website home page

Source: planetb.colonizing.company. © Vasilisa Aristarkhova