This book provides detailed insights into how space and popular culture intersect across a broad spectrum of examples, including cinema, music, art, arcade games, cartoons, comics, and advertisements. This is a pertinent topic since the use of space themes differs in different cultural contexts, and these themes can be used to explore various aspects of the human condition and provide a context for social commentary on politically sensitive issues. With the use of space imagery evolving over the past sixty years of the space age, this is a topic ripe for in-depth exploration. The book also discusses the contrasting visions of space from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the reality of today and analyzes space vehicles and habitats in popular depictions of space from an engineering perspective, exploring how many of those ideas have actually been implemented in practice and why or why not (a case of life imitating art and vice versa). As such, it covers a wide array of relevant and timely topics examining intersections between space and popular culture and offering accounts of space and its effect on culture, language, and storytelling from the southern regions of the world.
Author(s): Annette Froehlich
Series: Southern Space Studies
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 102
City: Cham
Contents
1 Mexican Mars: Narrating Spatial Futures from the Margins
1 Marsarchive.org
2 Imagining Martenochtitlan
3 Myth, Rite, and Site
4 Mars in Guerrero
5 Conclusions
2 Jellyfish from Outer Space: Tentacular Creatures and Cosmic Responsibility in Environmental Art and Pop Culture
1 Theoretical Framework and Relevance: Tentacular Creatures and Relational Aesthetics
2 “Why Not Combine Outer Space and Inner Space?”—From Jellyfish on Spaceship Earth to Jellyfish Spaceships and Bioluminescent Cosmic Escapism
3 Jellyfish in Space Art: Transgressions and Non-Human Encounters with the Jelly Kind
4 Jellyfish and Cosmic Responsibility: Conclusive Thoughts on the Environmental Message of Tentacular Creatures in Art and Popular Culture
3 Space Travel: Human Cosmic Hitchhiker Concept
1 Introduction
2 Viruses
3 Panspermia
3.1 Ballistic Panspermia
4 Asteroids
5 Comets
6 Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites
7 Meteoroid
8 Meteor
9 Meteorite
9.1 Directed Panspermia
10 Conclusion
4 Africa: Home of Space Art and Indigenous Astronomy
1 Afrofuturism
2 Romantics, Dreamers, Explorers
2.1 Space Art and Indigenous Astronomy
3 Capturing the Universe
4 Interpreting Science and Humanities
4.1 Entering Africa
4.2 Encompassing the Humanities
4.3 Encountering Inconvenient Truths
5 Modus Operandi: Inquiry and Research
5.1 Inquiry into Logarithms and Sound—Lyndi Sales
5.2 Inquiry into Satellite Imagery—Marcus Neustetter
5.3 Inquiry into Indigenous Astronomy and Cosmology—Barbara Amelia King
6 Space, the New Frontier for African Arts
6.1 Creating for Space
6.2 Creating in Space
7 Conclusion
