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.
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.
Art has been going to space for more than half a century. Much of this work treats space as a destination. The achievement is getting there, and the hope is that the work arrives intact. Space is where the artwork goes, or what it depicts, rather than something that acts on it. My concept of Astromorphic Art approaches that relationship from the other side. It is my artistic approach for works in which the conditions of space are built into the making itself, where radiation, vacuum, heat, cold and microgravity shape what the work becomes.
In this practice an artistic work operates across three distinct but overlapping phases.
It is designed on Earth, with deliberate intent: materials selected, surfaces prepared, vulnerabilities built in.
It is sent into orbit, into a combination of forces that exists nowhere on this planet. Atomic oxygen erodes its surfaces molecule by molecule. Ionising radiation passes through it. Every orbit drags it from extreme heat to extreme cold and back. Hard vacuum pulls volatile compounds out of its materials. Microgravity removes the assumptions about weight and support built into how materials behave and how forms are composed.
Then the work comes back, or it doesn't. The encounter with what has been made begins, or never happens 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 us by billions of years. This is what distinguishes the astromorphic claim from the familiar argument that all environments transform work over time. Those transformations are generally 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 that happens to transform in space is not an astromorphic work. The Voyager Golden Records have travelled through deep space for nearly fifty years, but they were designed to survive the environment. An astromorphic work makes transformation the intent, and makes the encounter with space the apparatus that completes it. Intent and encounter are both required. Neither alone is enough.
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
Space art discourse largely sorts works by location. Astronomical art is art about space; astronautical art is art physically in space. The astromorphic approach adds an axis that location can't capture: the nature of the relationship between work and environment. That means what the environment does to the work, and whether the artist designed for that doing.
I see two logics following from this.
The first is transformation: the work is prepared on Earth and the space environment alters it over time. The artist sets conditions, not final outcomes.
The second is constitution: the work's form is only possible because of space conditions, so the environment is a precondition of the work. My work Chromocosmology for example, would not simply look different on Earth. It could not exist there at all.
Both logics share the same underlying artistic principle: the space environment exercises genuine authorial agency.
Impression of the artwork Chromocosmology Triptych on the outside if the ISS.
Chromocosmology is specifically designed to physically engage with the space environment and change over time.
Image: Arno Geens
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 any artistic 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 dozens of scientists and engineers to ensure the success of every space mission.
Image: NASA
Who, then, is the author if authorship is distributed across artist, production system, and environment? And if the environment’s role in constituting works is not modification but precondition, can co-authorship even describe what happens? I think Karen Barad's intra-action may be more precise. It describes a single entangled process in which neither artwork nor environment exists beforehand as a distinct entity. Artwork and space constitute each other through the encounter.
Every astromorphic work ends in one of three ways, and each ending changes for me what the work is.
Returned works come back. They are transformed, documented and brought back to Earth, where the record can be read and the artifact encountered directly, as a material object. These are the rarest artefacts.
Works in decaying orbits never come back. They transform until reentry in Earth's atmosphere consumes them. Nothing survives, and no one encounters them in any conventional sense. This regime is more radical than return, and more honest about how indifferent space is to human ideas of preservation and value.
Permanent works, in stable high orbits or beyond Earth orbit altogether, have no ending on a human timescale. They are never consumed and never returned. They keep transforming indefinitely, closer to pure release than to anything art has traditionally been for.
I think 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 work returns, its ontology changes again: it stops being an astromorphic or space-borne artefact and to me becomes instead an artefact with a space-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 but an orbital singularity, tied to a specific trajectory, a specific mission, a specific duration in a specific environment. Standing next to such a work is to me not the same as standing next to a painting. In my opinion the returned object does not represent the overwhelming, as most art engaging with the Sublime or the cosmos 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 epistemologically, beyond the emotional response? And what does it mean to make work under these conditions, as a practice conducted within the physical and philosophical reality of space, on space's own terms rather than as a statement about it?