Habitability Project: Public Conversation
What would it take to create an environment in outer space that we all would want to inhabit? We would love to invite our fellow UMN departments to consider this with us.
The advent of space exploration created a new—and unique—need to create habitable environments completely from scratch. In 1970, artist Robert Irwin and space program psychologist Edward Wortz designed NASA's First National Symposium on Habitability of Environments, which brought researchers, engineers, and artists into Irwin’s studio to collaboratively tackle the challenge and reframe the ways in which we conceive, design and inhabit environments.
Inspired by Irwin and Wortz collaboration, WAM will convene the Second National Symposium on Habitability of Environments in 2020. In preparation for the symposium, a cohort of collaborators from the arts, commercial space exploration, architecture, space medicine, anthropology and art history will gather this October in Minneapolis to consider the question: What fields of knowledge and ways of knowing are necessary to address the challenge of habitability?
Please join us for a public conversation following the workshop that will include an overview of the Habitability Project by WAM curator Boris Oicherman, followed by a screening of Tektite Revisited: Meghan O’Hara and James Merle Thomas’ in-progress documentary about NASA’s underwater habitability research in the U.S. Virgin Islands between 1969-70. The event will culminate with a roundtable discussion involving workshop participants.
See our website or Facebook event page for event registration and extended information about the event and workshop. Feel free to contact the project curator Boris Oicherman with any related inquiries: boris@umn.edu.