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Earthbound visions: received cultures of Latin American sky observation

Fri, May 27, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

During the Cold War a number of episodes of technological exchange between Latin American countries, the USA and the USSR took place when NASA’s U.S. tracking stations and Soviet astronomical domes and telescopes were installed along the South American continent, in Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. But the upward views driving these exchanges paradoxically had an even more profound impact on the earthly surface and its associated cultures. By discussing a wide array of objects and visual materials, the paper will explore how science and technology were imagined, designed, constructed, and practiced in Latin America, alongside the politics and the associated artistic and visual cultures attached to the reception and adaptation of a whole new set of urban, architectural, and technological objects. It will debate the manner in which both territory and airspace were conceived as commodities within a larger network of economic, technological and political exchanges.

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