space as a co-author of artistic intent
What if space itself became the artist?
I’m not posing this as a rhetorical question. It has material answers defined by the physical reality of the space environment. But it also has philosophical ones, and those are harder to resolve. Astromorphic Art is my practice built at the intersection of both kinds of answer. It begins from a single, interesting proposition: that the space environment is not a mere backdrop, a subject, or a metaphor, but an active participant in the making of an artistic work.
In Astromorphic Art, space is not the subject. Space is the co-author.
The practice operates across three distinct but overlapping phases.
Works are designed on Earth with deliberate intent - materials selected, surfaces prepared, vulnerabilities built in.
They are then sent into orbit, where they are acted on by a combination of forces unavailable anywhere on this planet: atomic oxygen that erodes surfaces at the molecular level; lethal doses of radiation arriving from all directions; thermal cycling between extreme heat and extreme cold that stresses materials across hundreds of degrees within a single orbit; hard vacuum that destabilises chemical compounds and drives outgassing; weightlessness that removes the gravitational assumptions embedded in how materials behave and how forms are composed.
Finally, the work is returned - or it isn’t - and the encounter with what has been made begins - or doesn’t happen at all.
The artist is absent throughout this transformation. There is no intervening, no adjusting, no moment of deciding when the work is finished. The outer space environment runs the process on its own terms, according to physical laws that predate the Earth by billions of years. This is what distinguishes the astromorphic claim from the familiar argument that all environments transform work over time, that weather erodes sculpture, that light fades pigment. Those transformations are accessible, reversible in principle, and open to human interference. The outer space environment is none of these things. The inaccessibility during transformation changes the ontological relationship between artist and work at its most critical phase. The indifference at cosmic scale is not only a more extreme version of terrestrial weathering, but is categorically different.
The operative term is intentional design. An object in space that incidentally transforms is not an astromorphic work. The Voyager Golden Record is in deep space, subject to the space environment over the very long term, but it was not designed for environmental authorship. It was designed for preservation. An astromorphic work is one where transformation is the intent, where the encounter with space conditions is the apparatus through which the work is completed. Intent and encounter are both required. Neither alone is sufficient.
Voyager Golden Record disk in its gold-plated container to protect and preserve it against the harsh conditions of space.
In this picture the Golden Record can be seen bolted to the outside of the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager spacecraft has left the solar system and is currently in deep space.
Image: NASA
This distinction generates a more precise taxonomy than the one currently available in space art discourse, which largely separates astronomical art - art about space - from what I call astronautical art - art physically in space. The astromorphic framework replaces this descriptive sorting by location with a theoretical axis: the nature of the relationship between work and environment. That axis is not where the work is, but what the environment does to it, and whether the artist designed for that doing.
Within this framework, two operative logics emerge.
The first is transformation: the work is prepared on Earth and the space environment alters it over time. The artist sets conditions, not outcomes.
The second is constitution: the work’s form is only possible because of space conditions. The environment is not a modifier but a precondition of the work’s existence. Liat Segal’s Impossible Object (2022) - a sculpture of liquid water held in three-dimensional form by microgravity and surface tension - cannot exist on Earth. It is not that the work would look different on Earth; it is that on Earth, the work simply cannot exist.
Both logics share the same underlying principle - the space environment exercises genuine authorial agency - but they make different philosophical claims and require different theoretical treatment.
Liat Segal’s Impossible Object - a sculpture of liquid water held in three-dimensional form by microgravity and surface tension.
The image shows the activation of the sculpture on board of the International Space Station as part of the AX-1 mission’s Rakia Art Mission.
Image: Eitan Stibbe, Ramon Foundation
The question of authorship is therefore genuinely open. The artist in astromorphic practice is neither a traditional author executing a vision, nor someone who simply surrenders control. The role is more specific: the artist designs conditions, negotiates with systems, and interprets outcomes. Before the work reaches space, it must survive an apparatus of institutional, technical, legal, and regulatory pressures that exert their own formative force. Mass and volume constraints, outgassing limits, vibration qualification, integration procedures, export control regimes, launch schedules that don’t wait: each of these reaches into the work itself, eliminating materials, forcing substitutions, setting hard limits on ambition. What reaches space is already a negotiated object, shaped not only by the artist’s intent but by everything the production system required. The space environment then acts on this already-compromised work. The final form carries the trace of both encounters.
The International Space Station Mission Control Room, Space Center Houston.
The ISS Control Room serves as the final step of a meticulously planned sequence of commands, procedures and protocols. This is the culmination of an intricate process of distributed authorship that involves hundreds of scientists and engineers to ensure the success of every space mission.
Image: NASA
Who, then, is the author? The question is borrowed from Barthes and Foucault, but the astromorphic context applies unusual pressure to it. If authorship is distributed across artist, production system, and environment, does the concept still hold? And if the environment’s role in constituting works is not modification but precondition, can co-authorship even describe what happens? Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action may be more precise: not two parties acting on each other, but a single entangled process in which neither the artwork nor the environment exists as a distinct prior entity. The artwork is not acted upon by space. The artwork and space constitute each other through the encounter.
Three distinct regimes seem to further complicate the picture. Returned works are transformed, documented, brought back. The record is legible; the encounter with the returned artifact is direct and material.
Unreturned works in decaying orbits are launched and not recovered - transformed without witnesses, eventually consumed through reentry and destroyed. There is no artifact, no documentation of transformation, no audience in any conventional sense. This is philosophically more radical, and more honest about space’s indifference to human categories of preservation and value.
Permanent works in stable high orbits or escaped from Earth orbit are transforming indefinitely on human timescales, neither consumed nor returned - closer to pure release than to any traditional conception of what art is for. These three regimes are not the same practice at different scales of ambition. Each operates under a different logic, and no existing framework in contemporary art theory seems to address these distinctions.
The permanent and unreturned works raise an interesting curatorial question: for whom is the work made, if no audience will ever encounter it? The question is not a failure of the practice, it is its most interesting pressure point. Art has largely been conceived as a communicative act, addressed to a viewer, a reader, a listener. Astromorphic Art, in its more radical expressions, removes the audience entirely. What remains when audience is subtracted? Is it still art? And if it is, what does that reveal about what art actually is?
When a returned work does enter a gallery, the viewer’s encounter is unusual in a specific way. The object carries an exposure history: a record of radiation dose, thermal cycling, atomic oxygen flux, orbital period, that is unique and irreversible. No two works will ever be transformed in exactly the same way. This is not mere singularity in the art market sense of the unique object; it is orbital singularity, tied to a specific trajectory, a specific mission, a specific duration in a specific environment. Standing next to such a work is not the same as standing next to a painting. The forces that shaped it predate the solar system. They are operating at scales - temporal, physical, cosmic - that are genuinely beyond human comprehension. In my opinion the returned object does not represent the overwhelming thing, as most art engaging with the Sublime does. It instruments it. It is a record of a direct encounter with it. That is a fundamentally different relationship between artwork and viewer than representation allows.
So, what does it mean to look at that? What does the encounter ask of the viewer - not emotionally, but epistemologically? And what does it mean to make work under these conditions - not as a statement about space, but as a practice conducted within the physical and philosophical reality of space, on space’s own terms?
These are the questions astromorphic art is learning to hold.