Lebendinger Weltraum (living outer-space) is a piece concerned with the hauntological legacy of technologies and how this affects their societal potential. A question of whether technologies such as the car or the rocket can be divorced from the fascistic ideology, of those involved in their conception. Do these technologies that perpetuate the supremacy of the individual, need to be reappraised with an ideological understanding of their affordances? The question feels especially poignant as space inhabitation once again becomes a cause celebre. With corporations once again leading a charge on colonialism we must consider the history of exploitation, expansion and the role of technology perpetuating unequal societies. The idea of challenging this ontology was also influenced by an alternative philosophy concerning space travel. The early Soviet philosophy of Space Cosmism opposes our cultural conceptions of space inhabitation. In Space Cosmism the “common task” is to populate the future with past generations, “we should give birth to fathers not sons”.

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My choice to relate these selected images to one another using Soviet film maker, Sergei Eisensteins “Intellectual Montage Theory”. Is an attempt to negate the Randian-individualism espoused in the hero worship of the authors of the technologies I've included. Creating this web of relation therefore, highlights a more existential materialist contention. Whereby, we must realise the necessity of an equality in society and a neutrality of the affordance of technology. The piece especially highlights the interlinking of the US and Fascist Germany historically. though the germanic influence on the United States of America is far older than than the 30's I felt that the particular links between Germany and the U.S were particularly interesting in the post war years as it almost exemplifies the transition of technological and scientific supremacy moving from Germany and Europe in general to the U.S. But what it brings with it in the technologies and an people who create them is the fascist mindset that is instilled in the history of these products.

 

One sees in the piece, the V2 rocket, built by with concentration camp labour by Nazi, Werner Von Braun (also pictured). Von Braun later became the head of the NASA Space program. On the opposite page the Volkswagen beetle a car that was created by the Nazis and symbolises both the Nazi conception of the people, or "Volk" as well as the German orientation towards the mechanical and the mass produced. The image I used was an advert from the re-marketing of the car by American advertising company Doyle Dane and Bernbach. Once again showing the interlocutor between American capitalism and the forces created to protect its establishment of hierarchy, The fascists. Other note worthy features in the piece include an arrested member of the R.A.F the Red Army Faction, who attempted to highlight the smooth transition between the Nazi power structure and the societal hierarchy set up in West Germany after the Second World War, director Leni Riefenstahl creator of the idea of the cinematic sublime and a screen shot of the film Ten Commandments starring future head of the NRA Charlton Heston and directed by Cecile B. Demilles who felt it necessary to proceed the film with an Anti communist monologue.​

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The reason for the inclusion of these pieces is to try and show the nebulous link between the past and the present is not just established by ideas espoused directly through speech. But instead that the transferal of ideas can come in many trojan horses. Be they the consumable cultural, replicable social structures or even technologies which have specific affordances that enable specific outcomes. 

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