Association of Autonomous Astronauts

Last updated

AAA logo Association of Autonomous Astronauts (logo).png
AAA logo

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a worldwide network of community-based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. The AAA was founded 23 April 1995. Although many of their activities were reported as serious participation in conferences or protests against the militarization of space, some were also considered art pranks, media pranks, or elaborate spoof. [1] The AAA had numerous local chapters which operated independently of one another, with the AAA effectively operating as a collective pseudonym along the lines of Luther Blissett (nom de plume). [2]

Contents

The Association's ostensible five-year mission, a reference to Star Trek , was to "establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space". [2] Artists who became involved were often connected to the zine scene or mail art movements. [2] The five-year mission's completion was marked at the 2000 Fortean Times conference. [3] Some chapters have continued activities to the present day. Several AAAers have experienced zero-gravity training flights.

The writer Tom Hodgkinson described participants as "a loose bunch of Marxists, futurists, and revolutionaries on the dole", going on to explicate their mission as "reclaim[ing] the idea of space travel for the common man". To the AAA, he said, "space travel represented an ideal of freedom". [4] Annick Bureaud of Leonardo/OLATS viewed their work as "space art" that "combine[d] freely space, cyberspace, raves, esoteric things, techno-music, etc.", calling attention to "how they recycle ... key images (the MIR Space Station, the astronauts on the Moon, etc.) ... mixed with science-fiction (and specially Star Trek) buzz-words or images" and then subjected these "sacred icons" to "iconoclastic treatments". [5]

In his book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, the theorist Brian Holmes said of the AAA: "The ideas sound fantastic, but the stakes are real: imagining a political subject within the virtual class, and therefore, within the economy of cultural production and intellectual property that had paralyzed the poetics of resistance." [6]

The London chapter participated in the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism protests during that year's G8 summit, with a contingent of AAA members dressed in space suits delivering a petition against the militarisation of space to the headquarters of Lockheed. [7] [8] The group was particularly concerned about the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft and its RTG power source performing an earth fly-by to boost its speed toward the outer Solar System.

Timeline

three sided football workshop, at the 1st Intergalactic Conference of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Public Netbase, Vienna, Austria Summer Solstice 1997 3-sided Football.jpg
three sided football workshop, at the 1st Intergalactic Conference of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Public Netbase, Vienna, Austria Summer Solstice 1997

Music

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Rave-In-Space/release/379802

Influences on other subcultures

See also

Related Research Articles

Konrad Becker

Konrad Becker is a hypermedia researcher and interdisciplinary content developer, director of the Institute for New Culture Technologies-t0 and initiator of Public Netbase and World-Information.Org.

OLAT

OLAT is an acronym for Online Learning And Training. It is a web application – a so-called Learning Management System that supports any kind of online learning, teaching, and tutoring with few educational restrictions. OLAT is free software and is open-source. Its development started in 1999 at the University of Zürich and OLAT won the MeDiDa-Prix prize in 2000. With version 3.0, the system was completely rebuilt and is now available as a component-oriented application developed in the Java programming language. OLAT has support for various E-learning standards such as IMS, and SCORM. With version 4.0, many add-ons have been introduced to the system, which makes it very easy to extend the LMS functionality. With version 5.0, new features like Wiki, Calendar, AJAX Beta Mode, and Fulltext Search have been implemented. Version 6.0 comprised a new and improved layout based on a usability evaluation. A subsequent version provides full scalability, meaning OLAT can be run on a cluster of servers. OLAT 7.0 adds many new features, a course wizard plus the implementation of important standards like REST API, IMS Basic LTI and IMS QTI 2.1. In autumn 2011 some of the core community contributors left the OLAT community because of strategic differences and started an alternative fork which is named OpenOLAT.

Vautrin Lud Prize

The Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, known in English as the Vautrin Lud Prize, is the highest award in the field of geography. Established in 1991, the award is modeled on the Nobel Prize, and colloquially called the "Nobel Prize for Geography". The award is named after the 16th Century French scholar Vautrin Lud who is credited with naming the New World America after Amerigo Vespucci. The award is given in the autumn of each year at the International Geography Festival in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, France and decided upon by a five-person international jury.

N-Gage (service)

The N-Gage service was a mobile gaming platform from Nokia that was available for several Nokia smartphones running on S60 (Symbian). N-Gage provided numerous games with 3D graphics into an application featuring online and social features. It takes its name from the original 2003 N-Gage gaming device, which it succeeded.

Sal Randolph American artist and theorist (born 1959)

Sal Randolph is an American artist and theorist who works with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture. She founded the non-curated sound-exchange web project Opsound, which functions through the use of music released exclusively under a copyleft license, and has been cited by Lawrence Lessig as an example of how Creative Commons works to enable artists to collaborate more freely and build on each other's work. Other large-scale, collaborative projects created and implemented by Randolph include Free Manifesta and The Free Biennial, in which several hundred artists presented their work in free and open shows in New York's and Frankfurt am Main's public spaces. Artists participating in those projects included Christophe Bruno, Aram Saroyan, Swoon (artist), and Michael Cunningham, among many others.

Guillaume Bottazzi

Guillaume Bottazzi is a French visual artist.

<i>Opération Teddy Bear</i>

Opération Teddy Bear is an educational comic strip video game released in 1996. It was developed by Index+ and a co-production with Flammarion, and is written by Edouard Lussan.

The ACC–Big Ten Women's Challenge is an in-season NCAA women's college basketball series established in 2007 that matches up teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and the Big Ten Conference. The challenge is identical in format to the men's ACC–Big Ten Challenge.

Sonia Khurana is an Indian artist. She works with lens-based media: photo, video, and the moving image, as well as performance, text, drawing, sound, music, voice, and installation.

Chloé Tallot is a French contemporary artist whose medium is video, photography, drawings and installations.

Katerina Jebb is a British-born artist, photographer and film-maker.

Ylljet Aliçka Albanian writer and scriptwriter

Ylljet Aliçka is an Albanian writer and scriptwriter, mostly known as the author of the novel The Stone Slogans, and the controversial novel A Story With Internationals, which satirizes the diplomatic elite accredited in transition countries.

Thanassis Stephopoulos

Thanassis Stephopoulos was one of Greece's most important 20th-century painters, teachers and philosophers of art. He was famous for his works, representing a genre of painting which he had introduced, the abstract landscape painting. He was one of the most important representatives of the so-called Modern Greek art.

Claire Pentecost is an American artist, a writer, and Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, often focusing on nature and artificiality. Her work positions artistic practice as a research practice, advocating for the role of the amateur in the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of information. Her current projects focus on industrial and bioengineered agriculture, and the hidden costs of the global corporate food system. Pentecost engages diverse strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge. According to her model, the artist is someone who consents to learn in public, interrogating knowledge itself in the cultural space of art, a place where values are contested. She promotes crossing and disturbing the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally limit the authorized specialist.

The 1999 San Jose State Spartans football team represented San Jose State University in the 1999 NCAA Division I-A football season.

Andrew Kean Scottish footballer and entrepreneur

Andrew Alexander Kean is a Scottish former professional footballer and entrepreneur. Kean played college soccer for the University of Cincinnati and became the program's first All-American award winner in their history. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010 alongside NFL Super Bowl winner, Brad Jackson, and Olympic Gold medallist, Mary Wineberg. Kean is the founder of the sports scholarship agency, FirstPoint USA.

References

  1. ↑ Dee (April–May 1998). "Escape from Gravity – The Dreamtime Mission Revisited". Fringecore magazine. Archived from the original on 20 December 2005. Retrieved 2006-01-03.
  2. 1 2 3 "Multiple name". Sztuka Fabryka. 2004. Archived from the original on 15 September 2004. Retrieved 3 January 2006. Sztuka Fabryka is a worldwide non-profit artists organisation based in Belgium.
  3. ↑ Mark Pilkington (June 2002). "Roads Less Traveled". Fortean Times (159). Archived from the original on 8 February 2006. Retrieved 2006-01-03.
  4. ↑ Tom Hodgkinson (2005). How To Be Idle . HarperCollins. ISBN   0-06-077968-3. Hodgkinson is editor of The Idler .
  5. ↑ Annick Bureaud (1998). "Space Art". Leonardo/OLATS . Retrieved 3 January 2006. From the proceedings of the Rencontres du 13 avril interdisciplinary conference. Via the Internet Archive.
  6. ↑ "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms", Brian Holmes, Autonomedia, 2008
  7. ↑ Sathnam Sanghera. "Anarchists attempt to paralyse the City 10,000 activists are due to join a protest in London against capitalism". Financial Times . Retrieved 3 January 2006.
  8. ↑ "Halt the Nuclearization and Weaponization of Space: Report from the UK". Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Archived from the original on 15 December 2005. Retrieved 3 January 2006.

Further reading

An overview of Neoist activities in the 1990s, including highlights of the AAA's first two years.
A text discussing the AAA : http://www.republicart.net/disc/artsabotage/holmes01_en.htm
An insight in Italian language into AAA's philosophy, literature, history and future.
The book is free online: https://archive.org/details/anche-tu-astronauta
A selection of texts in french language into AAA's philosophy, literature, history and future.
The book is free online in lyber : http://lyber-eclat.net/lyber/aaa/quitter_la_gravite.html
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.