Before We Reach Another World

Before We Reach Another Wørld

Science Art, Experimental Documentary, and the Production of Exoplanetary Knowledge in NØVA III

Academic article by Symbiotic Intelligence

Emin Mathers

2026, 1

. Introduction

What can art investigate before science can observe directly and before technology can physically arrive?

Humanity has never encountered the universe through observation alone. Long before rockets, satellites, and orbital telescopes extended human perception beyond the limits of the body, images, myths, diagrams, maps, and works of art provided ways of making the celestial world imaginable. The history of astronomy is therefore also a history of visualization: worlds that could not be directly reached had first to become conceivable, describable, and representable. Contemporary space exploration has intensified this relationship between imagination and knowledge. Technologies increasingly extend human perception into environments inaccessible to unaided vision, while the resulting images become not only scientific instruments but cultural images through which societies understand their place within the universe.
A particularly revealing example is the first published image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of Messier 87, released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration on 10 April 2019. The achievement was frequently described as the first image of a black hole, although technically the image visualizes the black hole's shadow and its surrounding emission rather than the black hole itself. The result was produced from observations made in 2017 by eight radio observatories operating together as an Earth-sized virtual telescope. The enormous quantities of data collected by the array were transported to specialized processing centres and reconstructed through multiple calibration and imaging methods. The collaboration reported that the ring-like structure and central dark region persisted across independent reconstruction approaches, providing the basis for interpreting the result as the shadow of M87. (Event Horizon Telescope)

The significance of the EHT image for the present study extends beyond its scientific importance. It demonstrates that even an extraordinarily rigorous scientific image is not a simple optical record transmitted directly from object to observer. Between cosmic phenomenon and publicly recognizable image stand an extensive technological apparatus, data processing, computational reconstruction, calibration procedures, theoretical models, and decisions concerning how the resulting information can be made visually intelligible. Recent historical and philosophical analysis of the EHT has emphasized precisely this dimension: the collaboration had to establish the robustness of the image across different imaging pipelines, while the final public image was also shaped by questions of legibility and visual communication. The orange-red palette, for example, was selected partly because orange was culturally associated with heat, and the widely circulated image represented a synthesis of multiple reconstructions rather than a single unmediated observational frame. (Philosophy of Physics)

The cultural history surrounding the image makes this relationship between scientific observation and visual imagination even more revealing. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, created in consultation with physicist Kip Thorne, had already provided a highly influential visualization of a black hole several years before the EHT result. The film's representation was based on mathematical calculations of gravitational lensing, and later comparison showed striking similarities between aspects of the cinematic visualization and the subsequently observed M87 structure. The EHT itself notes that the Interstellar representation was scientifically informed but deliberately modified for aesthetic and narrative clarity. (DNEG)

This relationship should not, however, be simplified into a claim that the EHT scientists selected their M87 image because Interstellar had already taught them what a black hole should look like. The documented EHT process instead emphasizes independent reconstruction, calibration, validation, theoretical comparison, and robustness across imaging methods. (Event Horizon Telescope) What the relationship between Interstellar and the EHT does demonstrate is subtler and more consequential for this article: scientific and artistic visualizations can participate in a shared cultural field in which certain forms become legible as images of otherwise inaccessible realities. The image of the black hole was not produced by science alone in a simple movement from object to picture; it emerged within a much larger history of mathematical modelling, technological mediation, visualization, prior cultural imagery, and public expectations about how the unknown might become visible.

This problem becomes even more significant when the object of representation cannot be directly observed at all.
What happens when an artist photographs something that has never been photographed?
What happens when the photographic image retains the visual authority of observation while its referent is speculative?
And, more fundamentally, what happens to the act of knowing when the world being investigated exists only as a possibility? These questions form the point of departure for this article.

The problem is particularly relevant to the contemporary development of extraterrestrial culture. Space exploration is no longer limited to the scientific observation of distant objects. Private spaceflight, lunar missions, satellite infrastructures, planetary imaging, proposed resource extraction, and the increasing movement of cultural objects beyond Earth are creating conditions in which humanity is beginning to construct not only knowledge about

extraterrestrial environments, but also the beginnings of an extraterrestrial cultural memory. Artistic practices are participating in this process alongside science and engineering, producing images, narratives, and cultural artifacts through which possible planetary futures can be imagined.

This situation is directly connected to the questions posed by Art and Outer Space Aesthetics, which asks what happens to artistic research when it is carried out from and directed toward extraterrestrial spheres, and how interactions between art and technology can contribute to reflection on planetary issues. Rather than approaching space art primarily as representation, the call invites consideration of art as a field in which extraterrestrial futures, planetary ethics, and alternative forms of knowledge can be explored.

Yet an important gap remains. Existing theoretical approaches have examined different parts of this problem: Donna Haraway has examined the situated position of the knower; Susan Sontag has investigated photography's relationship to information, reality, and experience; Yuk Hui has questioned the technological and cosmological conditions through which worlds become intelligible; Yuri Lotman has theorized artistic texts as mechanisms for generating new meaning within a semiosphere; Aby Warburg has demonstrated how images can function as mobile structures of cultural memory; Boris Groys has examined the role of archives in cultural valuation and durability; and James Bridle has challenged exclusively human conceptions of planetary intelligence. These approaches provide powerful conceptual tools, but they generally address different dimensions of the problem.

What is less examined is how these dimensions might operate together within a single artistic practice to model the transition from an unobservable exoplanetary possibility to a culturally knowable and archivable world.

This article addresses that problem through NØVA III, a long-term artistic research project that uses photography, speculative exoplanetary narratives, scientific vocabularies, technological imagination, and archival practices to construct an imaginary extraterrestrial system. NØVA III does not claim to photograph actual exoplanets or to produce empirical astrophysical data. Instead, it deliberately constructs the conditions under which an imagined planetary environment can become observable, describable, interpretable, narratable, and eventually preserved. The project consequently provides a particularly productive case for examining whether artistic research can produce a form of knowledge distinct from empirical science.
The central research question is therefore: How can photography function as a mode of planetary knowledge production rather than merely as a representation of planetary reality?
The article argues that photography can function as a distinct mode of planetary knowledge production by modelling the epistemic conditions through which an otherwise unobservable exoplanetary worlds becomes perceptible, imaginable, interpretable, and culturally memorable. NØVA III demonstrates this possibility by transforming photography from a medium of planetary representation into an epistemic apparatus through which technological mediation, semiotic world-building, visual memory, and archival preservation become part of a single artistic research practice.
The argument develops through a qualitative case study of NØVA III combining practice-based artistic research, visual and semiotic analysis, speculative world-building, and archival analysis. The project is approached not as a collection of photographs but as an epistemic system: a process through which observation becomes speculation, speculation becomes visualization, visualization becomes a planetary narrative, and the resulting images and narratives enter systems of memory and preservation.

The article consequently proposes a distinction between knowledge about an extraterrestrial world and knowledge about the conditions under which an extraterrestrial world can become knowable. NØVA III does not establish the empirical existence of the exoplanets it imagines. Its contribution lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how artistic practice can construct a model of planetary knowing itself.

Its inclusion in the Lunar Codex extends this argument beyond representation and into cultural memory. Dr. Samuel Peralta describes the time capsules of Lunar Codex as messages intended for future generations, preserving cultural materials beyond the temporal and geographical limits of ordinary terrestrial archives. (Event Horizon Telescope) NØVA III's own archival trajectory therefore creates a productive paradox: the extraterrestrial referent remains fictional, while the human act of imagining that referent becomes a materially preservable historical fact.

The article thus moves from the question of how an image represents an unknown world toward a broader question: how can an artwork model the conditions through which the unknown becomes culturally knowable? In doing so, NØVA III offers a way of understanding artistic research not as a secondary illustration of scientific knowledge, but as a laboratory in which humanity can examine, test, and reconfigure its own methods of planetary perception.

: Literature Review

The question of whether contemporary art can function as a form of knowledge production has emerged within a broader transformation in the relationship between art, science, technology, and culture. Rather than treating artistic practice exclusively as a mode of representation, research in artistic research, visual studies, philosophy of technology, cultural semiotics, and critical theory has increasingly examined the ways in which images, technologies, texts, and cultural systems participate in the production of meaning and knowledge. The present study approaches this discussion through a more specific problem: how photography might operate when its subject is a exoplanetary environment that cannot be directly observed. The theoretical framework therefore brings together several approaches that address different dimensions of this problem: the situated position of the observer, the epistemic status of photography, the technological conditions of perception, the generation of meaning through cultural texts, the afterlife of images, and the role of archives in producing cultural memory.

Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledges provides a fundamental starting point for reconsidering the position from which planetary knowledge is produced. In “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), Haraway challenges the aspiration toward a detached, universal, and disembodied perspective. Rather than abandoning objectivity, however, she proposes a form of objectivity grounded in situated, embodied, and partial perspectives. Her argument is not that all knowledge is merely subjective, but that claims to knowledge become more accountable and more robust when the conditions and position from which they are produced are acknowledged. Haraway explicitly characterizes objectivity as connected to “particular and specific embodiment,” rejecting a perspective that claims transcendence of all limits and responsibility.

This approach is particularly relevant to planetary knowledge, where the apparent distance between observer and observed can encourage the fantasy of an objective “view from nowhere.” NØVA III instead makes the observer's displacement part of the artistic method. The project begins with terrestrial photographic material and places it within a speculative extraterrestrial framework, transforming the familiar into an imagined exoplanetary elsewhere.

The project describes this process as an investigation of how humans understand their environment on the scale of the Solar System, even when attempting to move beyond it.
Haraway therefore allows NØVA III to be understood not as an attempt to produce an authentic non-human perspective, but as an experiment in the displacement of the human observer. The relevant question becomes not “What does an alien planet really look like?” but “What happens to human perception when familiar visual material is placed within an alternative exoplanetary epistemic position?”

Susan Sontag provides the central theoretical justification for treating photography as a distinct instrument within this investigation. Her essays collected in On Photography repeatedly question the relationship between photographic images, knowledge, experience, and Reality. Sontag observes that the camera expanded the cognitive claims of sight through such practices as close-up and remote sensing, enlarging what could enter the field of visibility. At the same time, she stresses the instability of the relationship between photographic seeing and genuine knowledge: photography can furnish information without necessarily producing understanding.
More importantly for the present study, Sontag describes photography as a means through which things become incorporated into systems of information, classification, and storage. She explicitly associates photographic practices with astronomy, geology, microbiology, weather reporting, medical diagnosis, military reconnaissance, and art history. Photography therefore does more than reproduce appearances: it places what has been photographed into structures through which it can be classified and retained as information.
This makes photography particularly productive for NØVA III. The project deliberately adopts the visual language of observation while directing it toward speculative exoplanetary environments that cannot themselves be directly photographed. Its stated methodology combines a telescope and camera with an imaginative experience, explicitly departing from conventional astronomical observation. The resulting tension between documentary appearance and speculative referent is central to the project. The question is not whether these photographs constitute empirical evidence of extraterrestrial objects; they do not. Rather, NØVA III uses the epistemic authority historically associated with photography to investigate how an image can generate the appearance and conditions of knowledge when its referent is hypothetical.

Yuk Hui's Art and Cosmotechnics provides a third dimension by questioning how technology and artistic experience are related to broader ways of understanding the world. Hui's book explicitly asks what different experiences of art can contribute to rethinking technology in the context of artificial intelligence, robotics, and contemporary technological transformation. His discussion centers particularly on Chinese landscape painting and the concept of cosmotechnics, asking how artistic forms can reveal alternative relations among technology, nature, culture, and cosmology.

The significance of Hui for NØVA III is therefore not that photography should simply be called a “cosmotechnics.” Rather, Hui provides a framework for questioning the neutrality of technological modes of perception. A telescope, camera, sensor, or computational image is never merely an abstract conduit through which reality passes unchanged. Each belongs to a historical and conceptual arrangement that determines what can become perceptible and how it can be interpreted. This is especially relevant to artistic research directed toward extraterrestrial environments. NØVA III takes technologies conventionally associated with astronomical observation and reconfigures their function within alternative world-building. The camera no longer simply records an already existing planetary object, it becomes part of an artistic apparatus through which a possible exoplanetary world can be imagined and articulated.

Hui therefore helps reposition the question from “What does the technology show?” to “What forms of planetary reality become thinkable through a particular technological relation to the world?” This is particularly responsive to the journal's interest in interactions between art and technology and in artistic research directed toward extraterrestrial spheres.

Yuri Lotman's cultural semiotics provides perhaps the most direct theoretical basis for understanding how an artwork can generate information rather than merely transmit it. Universe of the Mind is explicitly organized around three connected problems: texts as meaning-generating mechanisms, the semiosphere as the space in which semiotic systems function, and cultural memory and history. Its first part examines how texts generate meaning; its second develops the concept of the semiosphere and the notion of the boundary; and its third examines cultural memory and historical processes.
The concept of the boundary is particularly relevant. Within Lotman's framework, the boundary does not merely separate one semiotic space from another, it also enables translation and contact between different systems. Later scholarship on Lotman's semiotic border emphasizes its bilingual function as a mechanism through which a semiotic sphere establishes contact with unfamiliar or extra-semiotic spaces.

This provides a productive model for NØVA III. The project repeatedly translates familiar terrestrial signs into a different semiotic environment: landscapes become exoplanets, atmospheric appearances become planetary conditions, geological surfaces acquire extraterrestrial identities, and ordinary photographic material is embedded within a system of scientific and narrative codes. The physical image may derive from Earth, but its meaning is reorganized by the new semiotic environment in which it is placed.
The significance of Lotman for this study is therefore precise: artistic knowledge does not have to arise from the creation of previously unknown physical objects. It can emerge through a new organization of existing cultural and visual materials. NØVA III can consequently be understood as constructing a speculative semiosphere in which terrestrial images become capable of generating exoplanetary meanings that they could not carry within their original context.

Aby Warburg introduces another dimension: the temporal life of images. His unfinished Bilderatlas Mnemosyneassembled hundreds of photographic reproductions and other visual materials into large, mutable panels. The selection and arrangement changed repeatedly, and the final known version consisted of 63 black panels representing interior of his mind, containing 971 items.
The importance of the Atlas for the present study lies less in its specific historical subject matter than in its method. Warburg treated visual juxtaposition as a means of producing historical understanding. His project can be understood as an image-based system in which meanings emerge through recurrence, association, comparison, and recontextualization. Cornell's reconstruction describes the Atlas as an “encyclopedia consisting entirely of pictures” and emphasizes its function as a memory structure through which the afterlife of images and cosmographical symbols could be contemplated.

This is particularly useful for understanding NØVA III not as a collection of individual photographs, but as a visual system. A single image can function as representation, when a network of related photographs, exoplanetary names, descriptions, and missions can instead function as a system of visual thought. The resulting knowledge is produced not only by what an individual image depicts, but through relations established among images and through their recurrence within a larger planetary narrative.

Warburg therefore offers a model for understanding the photograph as a unit within a larger apparatus of visual knowledge, memory and the past. NØVA III extends this problem into a alternative future: rather than tracing the afterlife of an existing historical image, it constructs images whose cultural afterlife can begin before the extraterrestrial referent itself has ever existed.

Boris Groys provides the framework for considering what happens when an artwork enters an archive. In On the New, he develops a distinction between the cultural archive and the profane realm and argues that innovation involves processes of valuation and revaluation across this boundary. The table of contents of the work identifies “The Value Boundary between the Cultural Archive and the Profane Realm” and “Innovation as a Revaluation of Values” as central chapters.
Groys's later discussion makes the archival mechanism explicit: the cultural archive preserves things considered significant, relevant, and valuable, while other things remain outside it. Objects can subsequently move across this boundary as cultural values change. His essay “Art beyond Spectatorship” adds a particularly useful dimension for contemporary art, arguing that artistic production increasingly coincides with its documentation and archiving.

This framework makes the Lunar Codex particularly significant for NØVA III. The Lunar Codex describes itself as a collection of time capsules, and a “message-in-a-bottle to future generations”, how Dr. Samuel Peralta calls the mission using digital and analog technologies to preserve art, books, music, film, and other cultural artifacts. NØVA III's own project text explicitly frames its inclusion in the Lunar Codex as a form of cultural memory and as an artistic record of how humans perceive and imagine environments at a moment of renewed expansion beyond Earth.
The archival transformation is therefore crucial. Lunar Codex does not turn the fictional exoplanets represented by NØVA III into empirical realities. Rather, it changes the historical status of the artworks themselves. The imagined exoplanet remains fictional, while the human act of imagining that exoplanet becomes a material, historically preservable fact. The archive thus creates a second life for the artwork: it becomes evidence not of extraterrestrial geography, but of a particular historical culture's attempt to think beyond Earth.

James Bridle's Ways of Being broadens this discussion by questioning whether intelligence and knowledge should continue to be defined exclusively according to human models. Bridle examines AI, animals, plants, natural systems, biological computing, and satellites as part of a wider planetary field of intelligence, arguing for an expansion of the concepts of intelligence and personhood and for a less human-centered relationship with the non-human world.
Bridle is therefore most useful at the horizon of the argument rather than at its methodological center.

NØVA III does not claim to reproduce a genuinely non-human perspective. Instead, it destabilizes the assumption that planetary perception must coincide with unaided human perception. The camera, telescope, satellite, computational system, and in later phases of the project - AI become extensions or transformations of the perceptual apparatus through which exoplanetary environments can be imagined. Bridle helps situate this artistic experiment within a broader contemporary discussion of planetary intelligence and more-than-human ways of knowing.

Taken together, these approaches establish several important conditions for understanding planetary knowledge. Haraway addresses the situated position of the knower, Sontag the epistemic authority and informational function of photography, Hui the relation between art, technology, and cosmological worldviews. Lotman the generation of new meaning within

semiotic systems, Warburg the visual relations through which images persist and generate memory, Groys the archival processes through which cultural value and durability are established, and Bridle the need to reconsider planetary intelligence beyond exclusively human models.

Yet these perspectives generally address different dimensions of the problem. What remains insufficiently examined is how they can operate together within a single speculative artistic practice to model the transition from an unobservable exoplanetary possibility to a culturally knowable and archivable world.

NØVA III provides a distinctive case through which this convergence can be examined. It does not claim to produce empirical astrophysical knowledge. Instead, it stages the epistemic process itself: an unknown exoplanetary elsewhere is approached through situated perception, transformed through photographic and technological mediation, constructed through narrative and semiotic relations, accumulated as visual memory, and ultimately preserved as cultural material beyond Earth. The central question of the present study therefore shifts from whether art can replace scientific knowledge to whether artistic research can generate a distinct form of knowledge about the conditions of planetary knowing.
This distinction establishes the conceptual basis for the analysis that follows.

. : Methodology

This study employs a qualitative case-study methodology combining practice-based artistic research, visual analysis, semiotic analysis, speculative world-building, and archival analysis. The methodological premise is that NØVA III should not be examined merely as a collection of photographic works, but as an artistic research system in which image-making, narrative construction, technological mediation, and archival practice interact in the production of meaning and knowledge. This approach is consistent with research on practice-led and practice-based methodologies in the creative arts, where artistic practice is understood not as the outcome of research but as a means through which research questions can be investigated and knowledge generated. Smith and Dean describe the relationship between creative practice and research as iterative and mutually informing rather than strictly linear. (JSTOR)

NØVA III is treated as a single, extended case of speculative artistic research. The project is particularly suitable for this purpose because its artistic practice extends beyond individual photographs into a larger system involving imagined exoplanets, scientific and technological vocabularies, exploratory missions, observational narratives, planetary descriptions, and archival inscription. The project's own documentation presents photography, observation, and speculative planetary construction as interconnected components of an attempt to reconsider human perception beyond the terrestrial scale. (Indiana University Press)
The case-study approach therefore focuses not on establishing whether the fictional exoplanetary environments represented by NØVA III correspond to actual astrophysical objects, but on examining how the project constructs the conditions under which such an environment can become an object of human knowledge. This distinction is central to the methodology. NØVA III is not treated as evidence about an external extraterrestrial reality, it is treated as evidence of an artistic process for modelling the possibility of knowing such a reality.

The first methodological layer is the analysis of artistic practice itself as a form of inquiry. Rather than separating research from production, the study examines how photographic construction, speculative narration, visual experimentation, and the development of exoplanetary systems constitute successive research operations.

The methodology consequently follows an iterative process rather than a sequence from theory to artwork. Existing knowledge informs artistic decisions, artistic experiments generate new observations, those observations reshape the project's conceptual framework, and the resulting images and narratives become further objects of interpretation. This corresponds to the iterative relationship between practice-led research and research-led practice described by Smith and Dean. (JSTOR)
The relevant research object is therefore not only the final artwork. It includes the process through which the artwork becomes possible.

Visual analysis is used to examine how NØVA III's photographs establish a relationship between representation and evidence. Particular attention is given to perspective, scale, photographic detail, recognizable terrestrial material, visual abstraction, framing, and the documentary conventions through which an image can appear to record an observed environment.

This is important because the project does not fabricate visually arbitrary extraterrestrial landscapes. It derives alternative planetary environments through the transformation and contextual reclassification of photographic material. The analysis therefore asks how visual properties normally associated with observation and documentation continue to operate after the referential framework of the image has been changed.
The method does not evaluate whether the photographs are scientifically accurate representations of exoplanets. Instead, it examines how their visual grammar creates conditions of plausibility and how those conditions interact with the viewer's expectations regarding photographic evidence.
Semiotic analysis investigates how the meaning of individual images changes when they are inserted into NØVA III's larger system of exoplanetary names, classifications, narratives, and scientific language.
This stage draws particularly on Yuri Lotman's conception of the artistic text as a meaning-generating mechanism and of the semiosphere as a space in which heterogeneous sign systems interact. Lotman's Universe of the Mind explicitly organizes his theory around text, semiosphere, boundaries, dialogue, and cultural memory. (Indiana University Press)

The analysis therefore follows processes of recontextualization and translation. A photographic fragment originating from a terrestrial environment may acquire a radically different meaning when classified as an extraterrestrial surface, atmospheric phenomenon, or planetary habitat. The methodological question is not simply what an image depicts, but what new information becomes possible when an existing image enters a new semiotic environment.

The fourth method concerns the project's construction of an internally coherent exoplanetary world. NØVA III is analysed through its networks of exoplanetary descriptions, observational claims, missions, technological instruments, hypothetical environments, and narrative events.
This is not treated as fictional decoration. It is examined as a form of epistemic modelling: the project constructs the procedures by which an unknown environment might be observed, named, described, compared, and progressively understood.
Yuk Hui's work on art and cosmotechnics provides a useful conceptual background here because it explicitly considers what artistic experience can contribute to the rethinking of technological relations to the world. Art and Cosmotechnics examines the relationship between art, technology, cosmology, and contemporary technological transformation. (University of Minnesota Press)
The analysis therefore asks how NØVA III's technological imagination changes the function of familiar instruments of observation. Photography, telescope, computational visualization, and other technical forms are considered not only as means of representing an already known world, but as components of a system for constructing a possible exoplanetary world.

The final methodological layer examines what happens to the artwork after its production and circulation, particularly through its relationship with the Lunar Codex.
Here the object of analysis shifts from the image itself to its cultural afterlife. The study examines how archival inscription changes the status of a speculative artwork: from an individual artistic proposition to an artifact preserved within a system intended for future cultural memory.

This distinction allows the article to separate two different claims. The archive does not validate the fictional extraterrestrial referent of NØVA III. Rather, it preserves the historical fact that such an image, narrative, and cosmological imagination were produced by humans at a particular moment. The archival dimension therefore becomes part of the project's epistemic trajectory.

Because the researcher is also the artist responsible for NØVA III, the study adopts a reflexive position. The author's experience and decisions constitute primary research material, but they are not treated as sufficient evidence on their own. Interpretive claims are instead triangulated through the artwork's visual structure, project documentation, theoretical literature, and archival context.

This methodological distinction is essential to the article's central argument. The study does not claim that artistic intuition automatically constitutes knowledge, nor that speculative images can substitute for empirical science. Its narrower proposition is that artistic practice can become a distinct epistemic practice when its procedures themselves are made available for critical analysis.

Accordingly, NØVA III is examined as an epistemic system whose operations can be traced through the following sequence:

situated observation - photographic mediation - speculative visualization - semiotic world-building - interpretation - archival inscription - cultural memory.

The purpose of this methodology is therefore not to determine whether NØVA III has discovered an extraterrestrial world, but to determine what kind of knowledge is generated when an artwork models the conditions through which an otherwise unobservable exoplanetary world can become imaginable, intelligible, and culturally preservable.

. : . Analysis

NØVA III as an Epistemic Laboratory

NØVA III is most productively understood not as a collection of photographs, but as an artistic system in which the conditions of planetary knowledge are deliberately constructed and tested. Its subject is ostensibly extraterrestrial: exoplanets and their environments, astronomical observation, exploration missions, possible biological systems, and the eventual extension of human cultural presence beyond Earth. Yet the deeper object of the project is the process through which something unknown becomes available to human perception and thought. The project begins with images and observations, transforms them through speculative interpretation, gives them an exoplanetary context, develops narratives of investigation around them, and ultimately places the resulting cultural material within a framework of long-term archival preservation. In this sense, NØVA III does not claim to discover an extraterrestrial reality. It investigates what it means for such a reality to become imaginable, describable and culturally memorable.

This distinction is fundamental to the argument of this article. If NØVA III were understood simply as an attempt to represent imaginary exoplanets, its epistemic significance would remain relatively limited. Speculative imagery has a long history in science fiction, concept art and contemporary art. What makes NØVA III more analytically significant is the fact that its alternative worlds are not presented as isolated visual inventions. They are situated within a progressively developing system of observation, terminology, scientific speculation, mission history and archival logic. The project consequently turns the production of a alternative world into an investigation of how worlds become objects of knowledge.

The first movement of this process is a displacement of the observer. NØVA III begins from terrestrial experience but asks the viewer to encounter familiar visual phenomena as if they belonged to an elsewhere. Existing environments, atmospheric phenomena, geological forms, reflections, landscapes and other visual observations are detached from their immediate terrestrial context and reintroduced as elements of an extraterrestrial exoplanetary system. The transformation is therefore not primarily physical. The photograph may remain materially connected to the Earth, while its epistemic identity changes through the context in which it is encountered.

This operation is closely related to the problem of situated knowledge developed by Donna Haraway. Knowledge does not emerge from an abstract position outside the world, it is produced through particular bodies, technologies, locations and relations. NØVA III does not attempt to overcome this situatedness by claiming access to an objectively non-human perspective. Its procedure is more subtle. It makes situatedness visible by changing the conceptual position from which an image is read. A terrestrial observation is displaced into an extraterrestrial context, and this displacement makes the viewer aware that what appears to be a neutral visual object is always dependent on a system of interpretation. And if we take into account the infinite possibilities of environments on exoplanets of all stars in all galaxies, then each described environment based on the scientific knowledge of humanity to this day, then all points of the universe become closer - a step from our imagination.
By the way the project therefore does not provide a literal extraterrestrial viewpoint. It constructs a situated human speculation about an extraterrestrial viewpoint. This distinction is important because it prevents the work from making an epistemological claim it cannot support. The artist cannot photographically occupy the perspective of an alien planet simply by imagining it. What the artistic practice can do is construct an alternative position from which the limitations of the existing one become perceptible.

The extraterrestrial consequently functions in NØVA III not only as an object of representation but as a methodological device. By moving an ordinary terrestrial phenomenon into an unfamiliar planetary context, the project asks what changes when the coordinates of observation change. A sunset can become atmospheric evidence, a geological surface can become an unknown exoplanetary terrain, an apparently ordinary natural formation can become a possible trace of exoplanetary process. The image itself has not necessarily acquired new physical information. What has changed is the network of relations through which information is interpreted.
This is where photography becomes central.

NØVA III could theoretically have been constructed entirely through drawings, digital modelling or written fiction. The decision to work through photography introduces a different epistemic tension because photography has historically occupied a privileged position between visual experience and evidence. A photograph is not identical to reality, and its construction always involves choices concerning framing, exposure, optics, timing, technology and interpretation. Yet photographic images have acquired a powerful cultural association with having-seen. Even when viewers know that a photograph can be manipulated, they continue to read its visual grammar through conventions of observation and evidence.

Susan Sontag's analysis of photography is useful here precisely because it complicates the assumption that seeing an image means understanding what it depicts. Photography can create a powerful sense of possession and knowledge while simultaneously separating the viewer from the complexity of the thing represented. The camera does not simply reproduce the world, it establishes a particular relationship to it.

NØVA III deliberately places this relationship under pressure. Its photographs retain the visual language of observation while their planetary referents are speculative. The result is an epistemic tension between the authority of the photographic image and the uncertainty of its referent. The viewer recognizes the appearance of evidence while knowing, or gradually discovering, that what is being presented is part of an artistic construction.
This is not an attempt to deceive the viewer into believing that the exoplanets literally exist. Rather, the project uses the authority of photographic seeing to ask a prior question: why does an image appear capable of telling us that something exists?

The question becomes especially interesting when considered in relation to astronomical imaging. The first image of M87, released by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration on 10 April 2019, provides a particularly important reference point for NØVA III because it demonstrated to a global audience that an astronomical object inaccessible to ordinary human vision could nevertheless become a recognizable image. The image was not produced by pointing a conventional camera at M87 and pressing a shutter. It emerged from observations collected by a worldwide network of radio telescopes, calibration, computational processing, multiple independent imaging methods and subsequent scientific interpretation. The resulting visualization was therefore the endpoint of a complex epistemic apparatus.

The scientific status of the M87 image should not be confused with the status of a speculative artwork. The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration subjected its reconstructions to extensive cross-checking, and the observed ring-like structure was supported across independent imaging approaches. The scientific image therefore possesses an evidentiary foundation that NØVA III intentionally does not possess. The comparison is valuable for another reason: both demonstrate that an image of an inaccessible object is never simply the object itself. Between phenomenon and public image stands a technological and interpretive system.

The cultural history of the M87 image also reveals that scientific visualization is not completely separated from existing visual culture. The public reception of the image was shaped by visual expectations that had already been established through astronomy, science fiction, popular culture and cinema. The visual similarity between the M87 image and the black-hole representation created for Interstellar by Christopher Nolan and physicist Kip Thorne became part of the public discussion surrounding the image. The relationship should not be overstated: the EHT did not select its scientific reconstruction because it wanted to imitate Interstellar. Nevertheless, the episode demonstrates something important for this article. By the time the first black hole image appeared, humanity already possessed a cultural vocabulary for imagining what a black hole might look like.

This is precisely the condition in which NØVA III operates. The image does not emerge into a cultural vacuum. Every new planetary image enters a field of previous images, expectations, scientific models, representations and technological conventions. Artistic research can therefore intervene not only by creating another image but by examining how such visual expectations participate in the production of planetary intelligibility.

In NØVA III, the camera is consequently neither a neutral recording device nor merely an aesthetic tool. It becomes part of the project's epistemic apparatus. Photography supplies the appearance of observation, speculative narrative supplies the exoplanetary hypothesis, the combination creates a space in which the viewer can experience the difference between seeing an image and knowing what the image means. The next transformation occurs when the photograph is incorporated into a larger semiotic environment.
A photograph on its own can remain ambiguous. NØVA III progressively surrounds its images with names, coordinates, exoplanetary descriptions, observational narratives, mission histories and scientific hypotheses. Through this process, an image that initially has no extraterrestrial identity acquires one. The transformation does not occur because the photograph itself has changed, but because the relations surrounding it have changed.

Yuri Lotman's theory is particularly valuable at this point. For Lotman, culture is not a passive container of already established meanings. It is a dynamic semiotic environment in which texts, codes and cultural languages interact and generate new information. Translation between different sign systems is one of the mechanisms through which such novelty can emerge.
NØVA III performs precisely such a translation. A terrestrial visual observation is translated into the language of exoplanetary science fiction, that language is then connected to astronomical terminology, mission structures and archival conventions. The image becomes part of a new system in which its meaning is no longer determined exclusively by its original terrestrial referent.
This is why the project is better understood as world-building through semiotic transformation than simply as photographic manipulation.

The creation of a exoplanet or its satellite in NØVA III does not require the physical invention of an exoplanet. It requires the creation of a coherent system within which an image can function as a planetary sign. Once the photograph receives a exoplanetary identity, it begins to participate in a network of relations. A rock surface can become geological evidence, a visual anomaly can become a scientific question, an atmospheric effect can become an alternative environmental condition, and a sequence of observations can become the history of an expedition.

The fictional world consequently begins to acquire internal memory.
This is one of the most important characteristics distinguishing NØVA III from a conventional series of standalone speculative images. The project does not ask the viewer to look at an imaginary exoplanet once. It invites the viewer to observe how knowledge about that exoplanet changes over time.

An early observation may produce a hypothesis. A later observation may complicate it. A new mission may provide additional evidence. A previously insignificant visual feature may acquire significance because another observation has changed the interpretive context. The fictional research process therefore becomes recursive.

The structure resembles scientific inquiry at the level of narrative form, while remaining distinct from science at the level of evidentiary status. NØVA III models the temporal structure through which uncertain observations can become increasingly organized into knowledge, and does not establish empirical facts about exoplanets.

This distinction is essential. The project's value lies precisely in allowing the mechanisms of knowledge formation to become visible without claiming empirical authority that the artwork does not possess.

The result is a form of artistic research in which uncertainty is not an imperfection to be eliminated but a condition to be investigated.

The viewer is gradually placed in a position similar to that of an observer confronted with incomplete information. An image is encountered first, interpretation follows, and only then does the possibility of another interpretation emerge. The meaning of an earlier observation can consequently change because of a later one. Knowledge becomes temporal and relational rather than instantaneous.

This is where NØVA III also begins to approach the question of planetary ethics.

At the beginning of an exploratory narrative, an unknown exoplanet can easily become an object. It can be measured, classified, mapped and potentially exploited. The history developed within NØVA III deliberately allows such a logic to appear. Exploration generates scientific interest, and scientific interest can lead toward economic and technological possibilities. The extraterrestrial environment becomes potentially valuable because it can be transformed into something useful for human purposes.
But the project does not leave the exoplanetary environment within this extractive framework. Its later movement toward artistic observation and Celestialism introduces another relationship, in which the environment is approached not primarily as a resource but as something worthy of prolonged attention and contemplation.

This shift is significant because it changes the purpose of knowledge.
If the only reason to know a planet is to extract something from it, then observation becomes instrumental. If observation can also be an encounter, knowledge can become relational.
Here the work connects again to Haraway's challenge to detached and universalizing models of knowledge, as well as to Yuk Hui's questioning of technological systems and their underlying cosmological assumptions. The relevant question is no longer simply which technologies can enable humanity to reach another planet. It is also what forms of relationship those technologies establish between humans and the worlds they encounter.
NØVA III does not provide a universal answer. Instead, it creates a fictional environment in which different modes of relating to an extraterrestrial world can be tested. Exploration, measurement, speculation, extraction, contemplation and artistic encounter become different possible orientations toward the same unknown.

This is one of the places where the project begins to move beyond photography as a medium.
Photography initially provides the mechanism through which something is seen. But once the photograph becomes part of a larger exoplanetary narrative, the artwork begins to ask what kind of relationship follows from seeing. The camera does not merely extend vision. It participates in the formation of a world in which the observed object acquires cultural significance.

The question of what happens after the image is produced is therefore as important as the act of photographing itself. This leads to the archival dimension of NØVA III.

The project's connection with the Lunar Codex is especially important because it introduces a temporal and material dimension that cannot be reduced to metaphor. NØVA III has been included in the Lunar Codex Polaris collection, with the project's documentation identifying the intended lunar destination through the Lunar Codex programme. At the same time, the current project documentation must be distinguished carefully from completed physical delivery: inclusion in the project and planned lunar preservation should not be described as though the work had already been deposited on the Moon.

This distinction is academically important because the argument does not require the physical arrival of NØVA III in order to establish its archival significance. What matters is the transformation of the work's intended address. The artwork is no longer conceived exclusively for a contemporary terrestrial viewer. It becomes part of a cultural project whose temporal horizon extends beyond the present and whose material destination is intended to lie beyond Earth.
Here Boris Groys becomes particularly relevant. The archive does not simply preserve objects that have already acquired historical significance. It participates in determining what remains available for future comparison and interpretation. To archive something is therefore also to make a claim about its possible future relevance.

NØVA III introduces a particularly unusual version of this archival function because the object being preserved is not evidence that its imagined exoplanets physically exist. What the archive can preserve is evidence that, at a particular moment in human history, artists imagined such exoplanets in a particular way.

This produces one of the central paradoxes of the project: the extraterrestrial referent may be fictional, while the cultural act of imagining it is historically real.

The distinction allows the artwork to generate a different kind of knowledge. NØVA III does not provide knowledge of an actual exoplanet. It can, however, become knowledge about the cultural conditions under which an early twenty-first-century human attempted to imagine extraterrestrial existence.
The archival act therefore does not stabilize the fictional exoplanet as fact. It stabilizes the historical existence of the imagination.

This is where Aby Warburg's conception of the afterlife of images becomes particularly useful. In the Mnemosyne Atlas, images were brought together, reproduced, juxtaposed and recontextualized in order to investigate the persistence and transformation of visual memory. The significance of an image was not exhausted by its original context, its later relations could generate new meanings.

NØVA III extends this problem into a future-oriented context.
Its speculative images are created in the present, but their intended archival life belongs partly to the future. A future viewer could encounter them not as we do — as a contemporary artistic speculation — but as historical evidence of how an early twenty-first-century culture imagined extraterrestrial worlds. The image would remain materially the same while its cultural position would change.

This is the point at which archival preservation becomes an epistemic operation rather than merely a conservation procedure.
The archive creates the possibility of a future encounter in which the meaning of the image can be reconstructed differently.
The same photograph can therefore occupy several epistemic positions across time. At the moment of production, it is an artistic construction. Within the NØVA III narrative, it is an observation of a parallel star. Within the Lunar Codex, it becomes an archival artifact. For a future historian, it may become evidence of a particular cultural imagination of extraterrestrial existence, and then inspiration for the next direction of humanity's path.

None of these meanings necessarily cancels the others. The image accumulates them.
This accumulation brings us back to the question of planetary knowledge. Knowledge is often imagined as something that increases through the discovery of facts. NØVA III proposes a different, complementary model in which knowledge can also increase through the accumulation of relations among images, concepts, observations, interpretations and memories.

The project consequently occupies a productive position between empirical knowledge and cultural knowledge. Its exoplanets are not scientific objects, but the process through which they become meaningful reproduces several structural features of knowledge production: observation, naming, classification, hypothesis, revision, comparison, narrative construction and preservation.

This is why the concept of an epistemic laboratory is appropriate. A laboratory does not necessarily exist only to produce final answers. It creates controlled conditions in which processes can be observed, repeated, compared and questioned. NØVA III performs an analogous function at the level of artistic imagination. It constructs an environment in which the transformation from image to knowledge can itself become the subject of experimentation.

The project can therefore be read as a sequence of epistemic transformations rather than a sequence of photographs. A terrestrial observation becomes displaced, displacement produces speculation, speculation is stabilized through photographic form, photography enters a new semiotic environment, the resulting planetary signs generate narratives of further observation, those narratives alter the relation between observer and environment, and the accumulated material is directed toward archival preservation.
At no point does this process produce empirical evidence for the existence of the fictional exoplanets. Instead, it produces something more appropriate to the domain of artistic research: a model of extraterrestrial knowability.

This is the point at which the individual theoretical perspectives considered in the Literature Review converge. Haraway allows us to understand the situated position of the observer, Sontag clarifies the cultural authority and ambiguity of photographic seeing, Hui reveals the cosmological dimension of technological mediation, Lotman explains the generation of new information through semiotic transformation, Warburg provides a model for the movement and afterlife of images, Groys clarifies the historical function of archival preservation, and Bridle extends the discussion toward forms of planetary perception that exceed the limits of unaided human sensing.

NØVA III does not simply illustrate these theories. Its importance lies in the fact that the project places their problems into sequential interaction.

The result is a process in which the artwork does not merely ask the viewer to imagine another exoplanet. It asks the viewer to follow how a planet of another star gradually acquires the characteristics through which human culture recognizes something as a world: it receives an image, a name, a location, a history, a set of environmental properties, a body of observations, a narrative of encounters and finally a place within collective memory.
The artwork therefore moves from representation toward conditions of knowability.
This distinction provides the strongest answer to the research question established at the beginning of the article. Contemporary art can function as planetary knowledge production when it does not simply claim to know an extraterrestrial world, but instead constructs and critically examines the processes through which such a world can become perceptible, interpretable and culturally transmissible.

NØVA III does precisely this.

Its achievement is not that it has photographed an exoplanet. It has not, and the project makes no legitimate scientific claim to have done so. Its achievement is that it turns the impossibility of such direct observation into an artistic research problem. Instead of treating the gap between human perception and extraterrestrial reality as an obstacle, it makes that gap the space in which the artwork operates.
The unknown becomes productive precisely because it cannot be directly resolved.
The camera enters the gap, imagination expands it, narrative organizes it, semiotic systems give it coherence, and the archive carries the resulting construction toward a future reader.
What emerges is a different conception of what an artistic image can do. It can be neither simply a document nor simply a fiction. It can function as an epistemic proposition: an image that does not establish what exists, but proposes a structured way of asking how existence might become intellectually visible and memorable.

This is ultimately what makes NØVA III relevant to the broader question of art and outer space aesthetics. Its extraterrestrial dimension is not merely a subject matter. It is the condition through which the project can expose the normally invisible architecture of human knowing.
By imagining a world that cannot presently be directly observed, NØVA III makes visible the instruments, conventions, narratives and cultural memories through which humanity approaches worlds it does not yet know.
The project thus suggests that the first step toward extraterrestrial knowledge may not always be physical arrival. It may be the construction of a new way of seeing.
And when that way of seeing is itself spread and preserved, the artwork does something even more unusual: it does not merely imagine the history of tomorrow. It leaves behind evidence that, before that history existed, someone had already begun to imagine how it might become knowable.

. : : Discussion

The analysis of NØVA III suggests that the epistemic potential of artistic practice lies not in its ability to replace empirical science, but in its ability to investigate the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. This distinction becomes particularly important when the object of inquiry is extraterrestrial. An exoplanet that cannot be directly reached or observed for now, cannot simply be represented through conventional documentary photography. Yet humanity has repeatedly developed images, models, instruments, narratives, and cultural objects through which inaccessible cosmic realities become intelligible. The history of space exploration therefore provides an important context for understanding what NØVA III contributes to contemporary artistic research.

One of the earliest and most influential examples is the Voyager Golden Record. When NASA placed the records aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, the intention was not primarily scientific observation but communication: each record contained images, sounds, music, and greetings selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth for potential extraterrestrial recipients. NASA describes the record as a kind of time capsule intended to communicate a story of Earth to possible future extraterrestrial discoverers. (NASA Science)

The Golden Record demonstrates an important transformation in the relationship between art, science, technology, and planetary identity. The spacecraft were scientific instruments, but the record carried cultural material. Scientific knowledge established the physical possibility of an interstellar message, technology provided its carrier, artistic and cultural selection determined what aspects of humanity would be represented. The resulting object was therefore neither simply scientific nor simply artistic. It was a technologically mediated cultural proposition about what humanity might wish another civilization to know about Earth.

This precedent is particularly revealing when considered alongside NØVA III. The Voyager project asks, in effect, “What should humanity send outward to represent itself?” NØVA III asks a different but complementary question: “What kinds of worlds can humanity construct inwardly before or while it sends its perception outward?” Voyager sends an already existing planet into extraterrestrial space as an image of itself. NØVA III constructs an imagined extraterrestrial elsewhere and then places the record of that imagination into an extraterrestrial archive for future's Humanity.
The difference may appear subtle, but it changes the epistemic direction of the artwork. The Golden Record communicates knowledge from Earth outward. NØVA III generates knowledge from an encounter with the imagined outside and eventually returns that knowledge to cultural memory. One is primarily a message about Earth - the other becomes a model of how humans imagine the unknown.
The distinction also complicates the idea of the archive. The Voyager records were conceived simultaneously for two audiences: possible extraterrestrials and humanity itself. NASA's historical documentation explicitly notes that, even though the probability of extraterrestrial interception is extremely small, the record has significance as a message to ourselves and as a record of how humans understood and represented Earth. (NASA Science) This anticipates the argument developed through Groys and Lotman in the present study: an archive does not require an immediate reader in order to participate in cultural memory. Its existence establishes a future-oriented address.
NØVA III radicalizes that condition. Its speculative exoplanets do not need to be empirically discovered by a future civilization for the archive to become meaningful. The future reader may instead encounter the project as evidence of a particular historical moment in which human culture was attempting to experience extraterrestrial existence. The archive therefore operates not only as preservation but as a form of future-oriented cultural communication.

A second historical precedent, the Moon Museum of 1969, provides an even more intimate connection between artistic practice and extraterrestrial cultural presence. Forrest Myers organized contributions from Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, and Claes Oldenburg, while Bell Laboratories engineers helped miniaturize the drawings onto tiny ceramic wafers. One such wafer was reportedly covertly attached to the Apollo 12 lunar module. The work's lunar placement, however, remains historically complicated: museums describe it as an artwork thought or reported to have reached the Moon rather than as an independently verified lunar artifact. MoMA explicitly preserves this uncertainty in its collection description. (Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)

This uncertainty is itself useful for thinking about artistic presence beyond Earth. The Moon Museum demonstrates that an artwork can acquire a new cultural status simply by being conceived in relation to an extraterrestrial destination and by entering the technological infrastructure of a space mission. The artwork crosses a boundary between terrestrial art history and space history. At the same time, the uncertainty surrounding the physical fate of the object reveals that extraterrestrial cultural memory is not dependent solely on perfect archival verification. The story, documentation, institutional records, and continuing interpretation of the object have themselves become part of its cultural afterlife.

NØVA III operates under very different conditions. Rather than attaching an artwork to a spacecraft, it constructs an entire alternative exoplanetary system and integrates its images into a long-term archival project. Yet both practices reveal a common transformation: once an artwork is associated with an extraterrestrial destination, the distinction between artwork and cultural artifact begins to shift. Space is no longer merely represented by art. It becomes part of the material history through which the artwork itself will be remembered.

The Moon Gallery develops this transition further. Its 2022 International Space Station test flight carried 64 miniature artworks, each no larger than approximately one cubic centimetre, as a collaborative installation designed partly to investigate artistic and material behaviour in microgravity. The project's own description presents it not only as an exhibition but as an attempt to develop the foundations of a shared interplanetary culture. (www.moongallery.eu) The artworks therefore occupied a particularly interesting position: they were cultural objects physically participating in an extraterrestrial technological environment while simultaneously becoming objects of scientific observation and experimentation.

This is precisely the kind of intermedial and transdisciplinary condition in which NØVA III operates. Yet its emphasis differs from the Moon Gallery. Moon Gallery physically transports artworks into space to investigate what happens to artistic objects when they encounter a new physical environment. NØVA III transports something more abstract: a constructed planetary epistemology. Its extraterrestrial environment is initially fictional, but the cultural material generated around it can become materially preserved beyond Earth.

This distinction allows NØVA III to extend the history of space art from the physical transport of artworks toward the transportation of ways of knowing. The question is no longer simply whether art can exist in space. It becomes whether artistic practice can participate in the formation of the cultural and epistemic infrastructure through which humanity understands its existence in space.

This is where the relationship between artistic research and science becomes particularly important. The examples of Voyager, Moon Museum, and Moon Gallery demonstrate that the boundaries between art and scientific or technological systems have never been completely stable. Yet NØVA III suggests that the most productive relationship may not occur when art illustrates scientific knowledge or when science supplies subject matter for art. A more significant possibility emerges when artistic practice constructs experimental models of knowledge itself.

The Event Horizon Telescope provides a useful scientific counterpoint. The 2019 image of M87 emerged through an enormous technological and computational apparatus, and its credibility depended on the stability of features across independent image-reconstruction techniques. (NASA Science) The image therefore demonstrates that contemporary scientific vision is already technologically mediated. What is presented publicly as a single astronomical image is the visible endpoint of a distributed process involving instruments, data, algorithms, models, calibration, interpretation, and visual communication.

NØVA III enters this same general territory from the opposite direction. Rather than beginning with an inaccessible physical phenomenon and reconstructing an image of it, the project begins with photographic material and constructs a hypothetical planetary phenomenon around it. Science moves from phenomenon toward visualization, NØVA III moves from visualization toward the conditions of a possible phenomenon.

This reversal is one of the project's most significant contributions.

The scientific image asks: What can be inferred about an unseen reality from available evidence?
NØVA III asks: What happens when an image becomes the starting point from which an unseen reality is imaginatively constructed?
The two procedures are not equivalent, and the article does not propose that they are. Their epistemic difference is precisely what makes their comparison productive. Scientific inquiry attempts to constrain representation through empirical evidence. Speculative artistic inquiry can instead expose how representation itself becomes a condition for imagining what evidence, observation, and knowledge might mean.

This returns the discussion to the central thesis. NØVA III demonstrates that artistic research can occupy a space preceding empirical knowledge without being reducible to mere fantasy. Its contribution is not factual information about an actual exoplanet. It is a form of epistemic modelling: the construction of a coherent environment in which observation, hypothesis, interpretation, technological mediation, memory, and ethical decision-making can be experimentally organized.

Such modelling has a broader significance for planetary culture. Contemporary humanity increasingly encounters the Earth and its surroundings through technological extensions of perception: satellites, telescopes, remote sensing, computational models, simulations, and increasingly AI-mediated visualization. The planetary environment is rarely encountered in a purely immediate sense. It is produced as knowledge through instruments and representational systems.

This condition makes the artistic question increasingly consequential. If technological systems determine, in part, what becomes visible, then artistic practices can investigate the assumptions built into those systems. Yuk Hui's concept of cosmotechnics is useful here because it prevents technology from being treated as a universal and culturally neutral instrument. Different technical practices imply different relations between human beings, environments, knowledge, and the cosmos. NØVA III demonstrates one way in which an existing visual technology can be redirected from documentation toward alternative planetary world-building.

Haraway's situated knowledge becomes equally important. The extraterrestrial cannot be approached through a completely neutral gaze because every representation is produced from somewhere, by someone, through some technological apparatus. NØVA III does not solve this problem by pretending to become non-human. Instead, it makes the displacement of the observer itself the artistic subject.

Lotman's theory explains what can happen next: once the familiar image enters a different semiotic environment, its meaning changes. The creation of an exoplanetary system therefore generates new relations between signs rather than simply new visual objects. Warburg and Groys then explain the temporal consequences. Images can survive, migrate, acquire new meanings, enter archives, and eventually become cultural evidence of the historical worlds that produced them.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that planetary knowledge should not be conceived exclusively as factual knowledge about planetary objects. It can also include knowledge about the cultural conditions of planetary perception. This is particularly important because humanity's extraterrestrial future will not be produced by engineering alone. It will also be produced by the images, stories, models, archives, values, and conceptual frameworks through which possible futures become imaginable.

This is where the idea of art as a laboratory for the future becomes useful, but it should be formulated carefully. Art does not necessarily predict technological or historical developments. Nor does artistic speculation automatically cause later scientific discoveries. A more defensible proposition is that artistic practices can function as prefigurative epistemic spaces: environments in which possible realities, relationships, and consequences can be explored before they become actual conditions of life.

NØVA III is an example of this prefigurative function. It constructs extraterrestrial environments before the existence of any corresponding human settlement, generates cultural narratives before extraterrestrial habitation becomes ordinary, and creates an archive of extraterrestrial imagination before there is a mature extraterrestrial cultural history. The project therefore occupies an unusual temporal position: it creates artifacts of a future cultural condition while still situated within the terrestrial present.

Its Lunar Codex trajectory intensifies this temporal paradox. A speculative representation of the extraterrestrial is itself directed toward an extraterrestrial destination. Thus the work begins by imagining humanity beyond Earth and ultimately participates, materially and symbolically, in the cultural infrastructure through which that beyond-Earth condition is remembered.
The broader implication is that artistic research can contribute to planetary culture not by competing with science for empirical authority, but by addressing questions that empirical science alone cannot exhaust. Science can determine whether a particular planetary atmosphere contains a given molecule. Engineering can develop instruments capable of detecting it. Art can ask what it means for humanity to encounter a world through such instruments, what images make that encounter imaginable, what cultural meanings are attached to it, what ethical relations follow from it, and how the resulting experience might be remembered.

NØVA III therefore proposes a shift in the role of space art. The artist does not simply depict the frontier of scientific knowledge. The artist can investigate the epistemic frontier itself.
The distinction is crucial. Representation asks: What does the unknown look like?
Epistemic artistic research asks: What must happen for the unknown to become something that can be seen, described, interpreted, remembered, and eventually understood?

NØVA III's significance lies in operating precisely within this second question. Its photographs are not empirical observations of extraterrestrial planets. They are instruments through which the conditions of exoplanetary observation can themselves become observable.
This suggests a broader understanding of artistic knowledge. Art can contribute to humanity's planetary future by producing not only images of possible worlds but models of possible relations to those worlds. In this sense, the most consequential product of NØVA III may not be any individual planet, image, or narrative. It may be the epistemic architecture connecting them: the demonstration that imagination can be organized into observation, observation into narrative, narrative into cultural memory, and cultural memory into an archive addressed to a future beyond Earth.

The historical precedents considered here show that this process has already begun in different forms. Voyager carried humanity's self-portrait into interstellar space. Moon Museum attempted to place contemporary art on the lunar surface. Moon Gallery physically tested an artistic micro-archive in orbit while imagining a future interplanetary culture. NØVA III extends this trajectory by treating not only the artwork but the production of planetary knowledge itself as an artistic object.

The consequence is a shift from asking whether art can survive in space toward asking what kind of cultural knowledge humanity wants to carry there.

That question is ultimately larger than NØVA III. It concerns the kind of civilization humanity becomes when its cultural memory begins to extend beyond its home planet. The extraterrestrial archive is not merely an archive located elsewhere. It is an experiment in how humanity chooses to represent itself to a future in which Earth may no longer be the only place from which human culture is understood.

NØVA III participates in that experiment by preserving something more subtle than a record of an existing world. It preserves a record of the human capacity to imagine worlds before encountering them.

In this sense, speculative art does not have to wait for the future in order to become part of its history.

It can begin to create this history through the worlds it makes conceivable.

: : : Conclusion

This article began with a question that becomes increasingly difficult as humanity extends its technological capacity to observe beyond the limits of the human body: how can speculative photography function as a mode of planetary knowledge production rather than merely as a representation of exoplanetary reality? The analysis of NØVA III suggests that the answer does not lie in treating art as a substitute for empirical science. Rather, artistic practice can produce a distinct form of knowledge by modelling the conditions through which an otherwise inaccessible world becomes perceptible, imaginable, interpretable, and culturally memorable.

NØVA III makes this process visible by transforming the familiar act of looking into a sequence of epistemic operations. Terrestrial visual experience is displaced into an extraterrestrial framework, photography gives speculative observation the visual grammar of evidence, narrative and scientific language organize images into exoplanetary systems, subsequent observations and hypotheses create an accumulating history of interpretation, and archival preservation extends this process into the future. The project therefore does not simply construct imaginary exoplanets. It constructs the conditions under which worlds beyond direct human perception can become objects of thought.
This distinction is central to the article's contribution. NØVA III does not produce empirical knowledge about actual exoplanets, nor does it claim to reproduce a genuinely extraterrestrial perspective. Its knowledge is instead procedural and cultural: it investigates how humans construct the possibility of knowing worlds that they cannot yet directly encounter. The project transforms the epistemic limitation of distance into an artistic method. What cannot be directly observed becomes the very condition through which observation, imagination, interpretation, and memory can be examined.

The theoretical perspectives considered in this study make different dimensions of this process visible.

NØVA III does not simply illustrate written theories. Its artistic research brings problems that these thinkers address separately into a single evolving process. The project consequently offers a more precise formulation of artistic knowledge: art can produce knowledge not only by representing an object, but by constructing and examining the conditions under which an object becomes knowable.

This finding also changes the meaning of the word planetary within the article. NØVA III does not restrict planetary imagination to the Solar System. Its use of the exoplanet expands the scale of inquiry beyond the immediate neighbourhood of Earth and its familiar celestial environment toward a larger cosmic field of possible worlds. The exoplanet therefore functions not merely as a fictional location, but as a conceptual instrument for breaking the human tendency to equate “planetary” with the local planetary system we already inhabit. Through the exoplanet, NØVA III moves from a terrestrial and Solar-System-based perspective toward a wider galactic scale in which Earth becomes one instance within a much larger field of planetary possibility.

This expansion is particularly important for the future of planetary knowledge. To think beyond the Solar System is not simply to add greater distances to an existing map. It requires new ways of imagining scale, environment, observation, time, memory, and human presence. NØVA III responds to this challenge not by claiming knowledge of distant exoplanets, but by creating a cultural and visual framework within which such worlds can become thinkable before they become directly accessible.

The archival dimension makes the argument extend further. The Lunar Codex does not transform NØVA III's exoplanets into empirical realities. It potentially transforms the artwork itself into a material record of a historical act of planetary imagination. The distinction is fundamental: the extraterrestrial referent remains fictional, while the human act of imagining it becomes historically factual. When such an image is directed toward an archive intended to survive beyond Earth, its cultural address also changes. It can become part of an emerging extraterrestrial cultural memory, available to future viewers who may interpret the work from historical, technological, or planetary conditions different from those of its creation.
This gives the artwork a temporal function that extends in both directions. NØVA III draws on existing scientific images, astronomical narratives, photographic conventions, and cultural memories of space, while simultaneously creating artifacts for a future in which humanity's relationship with extraterrestrial environments may be fundamentally different. The project therefore does not merely imagine a future world. It creates evidence of how that future was imagined before it arrived.

The broader implication is that the development of an extraterrestrial culture will depend not only on rockets, sensors, habitats, and scientific instruments, but also on the images, narratives, memories, and conceptual frameworks through which humanity understands its relationship with worlds beyond Earth. Art can participate in this process because it can operate before certainty, before direct access, and especially before technological feasibility. Its distinctive contribution is not to replace empirical knowledge, but to investigate what kinds of realities can become culturally imaginable and what kinds of relationships might follow from imagining them.

NØVA III therefore proposes a shift in the role of space-oriented artistic research - Celestialism. The question is no longer simply how art can depict the extraterrestrial. It becomes how art can model the conditions under which the extraterrestrial becomes knowable. This shift from representation of the unknown to the modeling of its knowability is the central contribution of the project to the discussion of planetary knowledge.

In this sense, artistic imagination is not an escape from knowledge. It can be one of the places where the conditions of knowledge are first tested.

And when that way of seeing is itself preserved, the artwork does something even more unusual: it does not merely imagine the history of tomorrow. It leaves behind evidence that, before that history existed, we, humanity had already begun to imagine how worlds beyond its immediate horizon might become knowable.

NØVA III thus suggests that the first step toward extraterrestrial knowledge does not necessarily begin with physical arrival.

It may begin with learning how to see beyond the limits of what is already known.

. : . : . References

Main theoretical sources
Bridle, James. 2022. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Groys, Boris. 2014. On the New: A Philosophy of the New. London: Verso.
Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Hui, Yuk. 2021. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; e-flux Architecture. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv1qgnq42.
Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. Introduction by Umberto Eco. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Warburg, Aby. 1929. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Unfinished project; reconstructed archival editions and digital facsimile by the Warburg Institute. The final known configuration comprises 63 panels and 971 images.

Artistic research and methodology
Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2009. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748636303.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean. 2009. “Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice – Towards the Iterative Cyclic Web.” In Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, 1–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748636303-002.

Scientific and space-visualization sources
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. 2019. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 875 (1): L1. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. 2019. “Press Release (April 10, 2019): Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole.” Event Horizon Telescope, April 10, 2019.
NASA. 2025. “Golden Record Overview.” NASA Science.
NASA. 2007. “Voyager at 30: Looking Beyond and Within – The Golden Record.” NASA Science.

Space art, extraterrestrial cultural archives, and precedents
MoMA. 1969. “The Moon Museum.” Work by John Chamberlain, Forrest Myers, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The Museum of Modern Art.
Nanyang Technological University. 2022. “Celebrating Singapore’s First Two Artworks in Space.” March 14, 2022.
Lunar Codex. n.d. “Story.” Lunar Codex.
Lunar Codex. n.d. “FAQ.” Lunar Codex. Accessed August 14, 2026.
Lunar Codex. n.d. “Three Faces of the Moon.” Lunar Codex, Reading Hall E.

Primary source: NØVA III
Mathers, Emin. 2026. “NØVA III.” Emin Mathers. Accessed August 18, 2026. https://www.eminmathers.me/nova3.

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