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
Chat GPT

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.

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