Art and change in an extraterrestrial society

In places where human rights will be constantly be under threat, for instance in vulnerable, off-Earth communities living in extreme environments in the future, will art have the potential to support us to break out or withstand? How will it enable us to share alternatives that challenge or disrupt those who subdue us? Drawing upon a fleeting, firsthand experience of art making, one that leads from the field of astronomy beyond art to a moment of political change, art in this context is situated as highly adaptive and evolving, as one node of political reality that shapes and is shaped by its social and political conditions. As I experiment to take the contingent qualities of a poetic experience of drawing in the dark into prose, this paper explores how art connects to the politics that surround it-how art has the capacity to change us.