Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship (2016) Springer Praxis Books
Bodies in Extremis, by Sarah Jane Pell p. 336-382
Fluid architectures for human survival in space:
I conceived my daughter Amulet during an unscheduled activity on the International Space Station: the marriage of my body and another within the body of space. Mission Control discussed an attempt to create artificial gravity by centrifuge to isolate exactly what gravity does to fetus development. Others suggested genetically engineering a substitute for the lack of gravity. It was all too late. Gravity played a vital role in the body’s circulatory feedback responsible for the development and maintenance of healthy bones and blood vessels. Without it, physicians predicted that my child’s skeleton would be more cartridgelike than bone. Born “en caul,” Amulet was splendidly shielded from cosmic radiation in her thermally regulated cocoon and floated out from me like a rare jewel. Initially, an infinite loop of biology, technology, vacuums, and pulses supported and confined our precarious lifeline. I delivered oxygen through the placenta, and her oral–nasal cavities meshed with the nanoscaffold stem-cell cannulae feeding ancillary O3 to maintain circulation and keep her chest cavity supported around her heart...
Amazon Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship (Springer Praxis Books) Paperback – 23 Nov 2016 by Rachel Armstrong (Editor)
Star Ark Book launch (2016) Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Professor Rachel Armstrong in conversation with Dr Sarah Jane Pell
Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University in conversation with artist and author Dr Sarah Jane Pell, Australia Council for the Arts Fellow, TED Fellow, Senior Space Art Consultant to Icarus Interstellar to celebrate the launch of Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship ahead of its publication on 23 November. Star Ark is a book about "worlding" and the formation of an interstellar culture that helps us reach escape velocity from the current global industrial paradigm and its pervasive socio, political and economic instruments. It invites us to think about "being in the world" and how we may realise this change at a time of great turbulence and growing inequalities. Based on an ongoing real world project Persephone, part of the Icarus Interstellar portfolio of projects that propose to construct an interstellar research platform in Earth's orbit within a hundred years, expert contributions from a range of disciplines – from astrochemistry to political scenography and the arts, consider our future among the stars and our present here on Earth. At the heart of Star Ark is a profoundly ethical project that asks about the nature of humanity and the broader role that reunites us as a diverse yet coherent species that is able to deal humanely with the paradoxes and contradictions of our times and prepares us for great challenges in the near and far futures. The launch event will be a conversation between Rachel Armstrong (editor/author) and Sarah Jane Pell (artist and author of Bodies in Extremis) about the kinds of practice that have led to the relevance of the interstellar question to contemporary arts practice and the nature of investigation necessary for the articulation of 3rd millennial practices of transformation.