Speculative Space Exploration

Handmade Space Journey

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What if space exploration wasn’t defined by billion-dollar budgets but by the resourcefulness of everyday creators? "Bricolage Exploration - A Space Odyssey" merges handcrafted ingenuity with cosmic ambition, crafting a speculative mission from discarded materials, 19th-century photography, and surreal technical drawings.

By assembling a fictional space mission from repurposed materials and obsolete tools, this series celebrates human ingenuity while questioning the ways groundbreaking technology is often misapplied or rendered absurd.

The project unfolds through four interconnected mediums: a handcrafted Mars Rover, tintypes of rocks developed via an 1850s wet-plate process that evokes modern high-contrast space imagery, technical posters, and annotated prints—bridging the practical and the poetic.

Join the mission. Whether you’re an artist, a scientist, or a dreamer, help expand the boundaries of speculative space exploration. Follow the project, contribute ideas, or create your own DIY space technology.

This series transforms overlooked, mundane objects into scientific curiosities, elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary. Handcrafted sculptures built from discarded materials evoke both resourcefulness and the inherent absurdity of our creations.

Captured through an 1850s wet-plate process, these images evoke the sharp, high-contrast aesthetics of modern space photography. This contradiction—using an obsolete technique to mimic cutting-edge satellite imagery—challenges our assumptions about progress and technological fetishism.

Keep Exploring

What makes exploration truly meaningful—the technology that enables it, or the human stories that define it? Are backyard rocks any less significant than meteorites, or does their history imbue them with greater weight?

If 1960s engineers sent humans to the Moon with analog dials and slide rules, why do we believe space must remain the domain of billionaires and high-tech industries?

The Intersection of Art and Science: From the Moon to the Page

NASA’s artists in residence have long documented space exploration in ways that extend beyond technical function. From Chesley Bonestell’s celestial landscapes to Tom Sachs’ bricolage space installations, art has always helped shape our cosmic dreams.

This project continues that legacy—not as an institutionally sanctioned endeavor, but as a radical, DIY alternative to official space narratives. It challenges us to see the cosmos through both scientific rigor and imaginative storytelling.

Gallery

Lunar Surface Study, 1850 (2024 Tintype)

Rover Wheel Assembly—Fabricated from Recycled Parts

Coupling Matrix - A Fictional NASA Report

The "Bricolage Exploration – Space Project" reflects the tension between analog processes and futuristic aspirations. This series celebrates the resourcefulness and imagination behind humanity’s cosmic ambitions, grounded in humble, handcrafted tools and materials.

Analog processes meet futuristic visions, cosmic dreams converge with improvised tools, and bricolage rovers alongside tintypes and scribbled diagrams remind us that progress emerges from creative resourcefulness.

This project invites you to reconsider the nature of exploration—whether driven by science, curiosity, or the stories we craft about the unknown.

Please download the proposal here.