Text published (in german) in Vergessene Zukunft : Radikale Netzculturen in Europa, ed. Clemens Apprich & Felix Stalder, Vienne (At), Transcript Verlag, 2012.
Independent Space Travel, by The Time Traveler
“Any state program of space exploration is primarily a spectacle, a propaganda project on which the politico-economic power is investing billions to celebrate its own "magnificent and progressive destinies!”
“It is impossible not to equate the notion of weight to that of "gravity". The weight of bureaucracy, gravity in Education and technological environment. State aerospace agencies are perhaps the best example of this latter model of gravity: they exist only because the sole purpose to reproduce this Gravicapital. Against them, independent and autonomous exploration of space seems to be the best way to produce new universes of values that can not be reduced to the equivalence of generalized Gravicapital. In this sense, AAA wants to demystify the faith in gravity and invites everyone to give up believing.”
Riccardo Balli, AAA 333
“AAA has now established that the struggle against capitalist social relations should be more widely understood as a resistance to Zombie Culture and the implementation of specific AAA Exit Strategies. This Zombie Culture is an elaborated program of invasion of the minds, a complex process of manipulation that aims at the implementation of specific forms of ideology in our minds, to ensure that we think and act accordingly. This Zombie Culture does not just want to ensure that we are sufficiently diverted from pursuing liberation projects, such as independent space exploration, but also need to exhaust our collective psychic energies in the idea of maintaining the state, corporate and military monopoly on the resources and the control of the space exploration technologies.”
South London AAA
Launched for the first time on the April 23, 1995, the independent space exploration program of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts has launched a new era. It was no longer in a novel or a movie, but in the real world that people claimed to go freely in space by ignoring governmental, scientific or corporate interests.
Even if it is difficult to root its origin (some locate it at the Community Copy Art, Culross Buildings, Battle Bridge Road, behind Kings Cross Station in London) it is obvious to say the AAA was born in the context of the transition from mail-art to the World Wide Web. We can also say now that the AAA primarly emerged as the encounter of post-neo-ist historicization-obsessed provos, hardcore techno & rave fanzines networks, millenarist free-spirits and tactical media activists exploring the Wild West of the early Web. Because the project was to master from its very beginning the field of self-historicization as an uninhibited provocation to the construction of histories of the avant-gardes and their academic interpretations by art historians, the AAA could actually leave to the next generation a toolkit that is still very operative today.
For remote people the AAA became first accessible through mail-art leaftlets or strange emails coming from obscure sections of the AAA (Inner City AAA, Raido AAA, etc.) that were presenting a Five Year Plan for independent space exploration. It was then possible to follow AAA activities through Annual Reports and trace its self-historicization. Crazy enough, it made up a growing movement and the AAA made itself public by organising its first Intergalactic Conference in Vienna in June 1997. The program was exciting, mixing the serious and the futile, challenging the highest political expectations of a rave scene that was desperately looking for something new and iconoclastic. Conferences, a rave in space, a three-sided football training game and a trip to the Moon by astral travel : this event marks a turning point as AAAers could finally gather after two years of corresponding. It was then followed in 1998 by the Bologna Intergalactic Conference, bringing other autonomous astronauts together for a similar program, as well as contradictory discussions with radical ufologist groups such as the Men In Red. The Space 1999 Intergalactic Conference in London, would add another level to the Reclaim the Streets demonstrations, : Reclaim the Stars ! All these events paved the way to the completion of the Five Year Plan. After that, the AAA was declared unnecessary, few sections continued in a 333 days extension and with the final Paris Zero Gravity festival. Two books were published, in Italy first, then in France, but the story was not closed, other groups have emerged or splitted, a multitude actually, and the story of the AAA goes on.
Its collective spectrality, caused by fleeting existence of a multitude of unstable networks, authorized AAA to voluntarily divert too inquisitive eyes of its only truth. And without any effort. The infinite multiplicity of individualities that compose it made all the newness and the richness of the AAA policy against archaic political organizations. All members could disappear without seeing its existence undermined. Without any real claim to implement a coherent social project, no regulative discourse of aesthetic attitude, the AAA made the unanimity of its members, while they never knew each other. Some met briefly, others were friends, but most of them, more numerous, did not even know they were autonomous astronauts. No radical political group had worked this way before.
The pataphysics of the AAA has acted as a powerful scientific counter-culture amongst its members. They might have wanted to reject science and technology, but needed it for their astral travels, so these will continue to rule the space flight, autonomous or not. Unlike a musical work, an aerospace technology can't be sampled. It depends entirely on a systematic and totalitarian scientific thought. The true dictatorship of language is there in the monolithic edifice of scientific discourse, whose autonomous astronauts drunk by debris per default ... or, for the more subtles, per game. This discourse of science is to be abandoned. The Autonomous Astronautics could well be the first non-science of a new generation of knowledge about reality.
Only a work of art or an aesthetical object can be détourned, a détournement essentially lying in the freedom of the body that thinks to inscribe new signifiers in space. Art lies in our freedom to create new forms ex nihilo. This is the essence of true AAA discourse. This is what has to be remembered. A spectral and ghostly network of artists, that's what the AAA has been essentially, continuously looking for autonomous projects. This is what AAA will always be. With the AAA, as with the Situationist International forty years earlier, individuals have worked to the formation of a transnational network of intangible and critical challenge to the established practice in a huge walk-in-nose to all leftist groups of their era. The Situationists had openly mocked crypto-Leninists and anarchists of all stripes, from 1957 to 1972. The astronauts autonomous from 1995 to 2001, although undermined from within by some pro-situs fans of the elitist old school leftism, openly mock the waffle of the dying extreme and ultra left. The autonomous astronauts, without any dictionary, began to create the vocabulary of a new language in the post-modern decay of political liberation.
The AAA has been a huge cosmic laugh, taken too seriously by a few teenage Star Trek fans. Music, dance, theater, rave in space, sex in weightlessness, and soon drip panting, sculpture or steady-cam video floating in multi-directional space, and a multitude of new forms of aesthetics and works of art. Autonomous Astronautics has been neither science nor technology, it has been an opening of the sensory pleasure to new climates and new situations. The crossing of unknown atmospheres and moods.
Everywhere where there was underground art work, the AAA interfered. Since the experimentations on new compositional data in the repetitive, noisy, climatic and industrial, acoustic and electronic music, to the programmed wandering of new drifts, from theater to dance in zero gravity, autonomous astronauts conducting avant-gardist experiments. Several of them experienced zero-g flights by infiltrating russian, american or european parabolic flights. The Noordung zero-gravity theater of Dragan Zivadinov is emblematic of this situation and his project is worthy of the finest Autonomous Astronautics. Multi-dimensionality is already implemented.
From a collection of individuals completely reduced to the simple device of its own logo and as an essentially vague project, the AAA has been the most fruitful and realistic political experience at the turn of the millenium. The first avant-garde of anything except itself. A premature political movement, never conceived nor given birth.
The AAA has developed space exploration as a language game that moves in several directions at once, and so shown that anyone can use words to imagine and create their own possibilities. Words can be used to subvert the commonly held view that space travel requires vast amounts of money, and language has been set in motion by the AAA as part of a vast collective fiction that concludes with the creation of a world-wide network of AAA groups all dedicated to building their own spaceships. To the AAA there is no difference between 'fact' and 'fiction' as they exist within independent and community-based space travel.
Having started with a simple idea - space travel should be open to all - the AAA has evolved into a complex social movement. This concept of an evolving space program was used as a framework for discussing and studying the ideas to see where the astronauts wanted to go independent and how they would achieve. The AAA said shortly after its official launch that its own ideas were already in the heads of everyone. What remains is the directions they explored collectively - movements that will be crossed, extended and transformed by the next generation.
The ultimate truth is that the AAA is as timeless as the Universe itself, as it is the true aesthetico-political enbodiement of zero-gravity soul liberation.
The AAA is an avatar, the Universal Process Network of Neverending Freedom.
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