The timeline of human history has been traced through our curiosity about the cosmos. This quest to find an “order” or “world” has motivated us to find relationships between stars, galaxies, matter, energy, and the physical laws that govern all these entities and their diverse particularities, unfolding imaginaries and cosmologies that anchor us to other senses and universes that lie on the edge of and beyond the borders of Earth.

As the universe unfolded, we embarked on a journey to discover a multitude of evocative worlds, seeking answers about our origins, the existence of life, and, of course, our place in the cosmos. In this myriad of cosmic gestures and stories, the human era appears as a brief flash in the history of the universe, making it urgent to reflect on the future and life on our planet. 

Ancestral, Beyond-Human Cosmotechnics 

Over time, we have developed different forms and instruments of observation. Ancestral technologies and knowledge offer us a profound understanding of the interactions between humanity and the cosmos, allowing us not only to predict celestial events but also to integrate them into our daily and spiritual lives, reflecting our connections to the universe. For example, the quipu (khipu), used by Andean civilizations, was a textile instrument and information storage system composed of knotted woolen or cotton cords of various colors that also functioned as a system for recording star maps. [1]

The Pleiades star cluster (M45) was known by the Incas as Qollqa, which means “food storehouse” in Quechua. The time when the Pleiades were visible in the skies was closely related to the annual agricultural cycle, and also heralded “the time of pilgrimage, ritual, and dancing along the sacred paths to and from the high mountains.” [2] These stars marked the preparation for the Inti Raymi festival, a day dedicated to thanking the supreme solar deity Inti for the good harvest.

On the other hand, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, a Mexican linguist, writer, and language rights activist, writes that in the Mixe language of the Mixe people to whom she belongs in the Oaxaca region, there is no specific term for “technology.” Any type of “metal” or “mining equipment” is referred to as pujxn (pu'jxn) and can include everything from an obsolete cell phone to a car; it encompasses the entire world, regardless of its level of innovation or sophistication. This less-specific way of understanding technology also allows us to recognize other ways in which technologies interact with the specific worldviews of each culture and its communities.

Without a doubt, these other technologies and knowledge rooted in different worldviews teach us to see technology not only as a tool, but also as an extension of our relationship with nature. Author and philosopher Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics offers us a critical exploration of the interrelationship between technology and the cosmos. In his book Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics (2019), Hui examines how technology has transformed our relationship with the natural world and the universe itself. 

Cosmotechnics is a concept that combines the words “cosmos” and “technique” to refer to the interrelationship between technology and the cosmos; that is, the influence and impact of technology on our understanding of and relationship with the universe and the surrounding world. The author begins with the premise that technology is not only a set of tools and artifacts, but also shapes our understanding of the world and our relationship with it. To this end, he proposes a perspective that goes beyond the mere instrumentalization of technology, focusing on its influence in constructing not only knowledge about the world, but also our definitions, imaginaries, and relationships with it.

It is important to recognize how and in what ways our current technologies are transforming our understanding of time, space, nature, and reality itself. In this regard, cosmotechnics is the embedded interaction between specific technologies and cosmograms (cosmologies). Technologies are therefore not independent or neutral entities, but are deeply rooted in the specific sense-thinking of the cultures and societies that produce them. Each cosmotechnics is an integration of the technical and the cosmogonic, which both proposes and challenges the Western notion of technology as something universal.

Thinking about our technical history, from a stone spear to a smartphone, means opening up a narrative about bodies and materials in performativity. It means thinking about the history of soils, skies, and rivers. It means thinking about the hydrological, atmospheric, geological, energetic, human, and beyond-human resources that generate them. It means opening up to the agency of technical matter and its relevance within our societies. 

A Cultural Geocosmic Laboratory

While space exploration awakens our radical imagination, we still face the legacy of a narrative that extends technology once again as a tool of conquest and domination. In this sense, borrowing from Benjamin H. Bratton, it is a time when it becomes urgent to look toward the cosmos not as an extension of the colonization of other planets, but rather as a way of returning our own gaze and our technologies toward a new “terraforming of the Earth” to make it habitable again for life. The current climate crisis has laid its foundations in our cultural forms, and we are thus also facing a crisis of our imagination.

The Earth is under constant threat from both systemic and epistemic violence, where the Technocene is being established in the face of a global ecosocial crisis. It is from this epicenter, in tension with our creativity and cosmological imagination, that the personal project of the Transplanetary Frequency Station (TFS) emerges: a geocosmic cultural laboratory nourished by radical imagination, speculative thought, and ecological and ancestral knowledge and feelings, where experimentation with diverse cosmotechnics invites us to reflect on our planetary communality and spirituality in these times of an Earth in conflict. Is it possible that, through our relationships with the stars, we can reaffirm our spirituality and planetary unity? What does it mean to be an Earthling in an era of a wounded world? 

Since 2023, EFT has conducted a series of community and collective immersions in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, taking the form of undisciplined dialogues, collaborations with other artists, sonic experimentation, participatory sound performances, bioterritorial immersions, deep listening and collective reading exercises, radio activations, and the construction and experimentation of open technologies for interstellar communication. Recognizing ourselves as part of the cosmic narrative is also part of our cosmic and planetary commonality.

First Transmission: We Are All Lichen

As part of the Radicante artist residency program, organized by the southern cultural space LiquenLab in Punta Arenas, Chile, the residents, accompanied by team members and the crew of the vessel El Huracán, embarked on a five-day voyage through the Strait of Magellan. During this voyage, we carried out a series of experimental, futurological, speculative, and artistic-poetic exercises that addressed the mechanisms of association between nonhumans and their respective environments, taking as reference the millennia-old bodies of glacial ice in the Alberto de Agostini National Park and the inhospitable southern landscape.

What prevailed was not the concretization of a work of art, but the practice of transdisciplinary and collaborative forms of production, thinking of technology as a sensitive membrane to face ourselves as Earth: 

. . . a conspiracy against the urgency of thinking in telluric rather than metaphysical terms; a radical conspiracy against an institutional, global, and commercial way of thinking about the environment as a resource; a poetic-political incantation against the reduction of nature to an object external to human beings; a subterranean and critical maneuver against the extractivism of the materials and knowledge that inhabit the depths of the Earth, of the beings that nourish it, including us, human animals, who have abused the powers of water, sunlight, air, the mineral-vegetable-animal nature that WE ARE. [4]

The first collective exercise consisted of sending messages to a glacier. These bodies of water invited us to imagine other possible planetary histories and temporalities; an attempt to escape our human exceptionalism through play, poetry, light, and sound. To do so, we drew inspiration from our collective reading of Olivier Remaud’s Thinking Like an Iceberg.

The second activation germinated in the darkness during our last night in the southern territory aboard the vessel. The question was: how can we collectively heal our planetary spirituality? Through exchanges among fellow artist-navigators, collective reading and writing exercises, and sound recordings with various microphones and devices—such as a very low-frequency sensor, a hydrophone, a geophone, and our voices—we generated a collective message to transmit to space in the form of a beam of light.

[5]

Second Transmission: “Dreams for Postponing the End of the World” [6]

The second EFT broadcast took place under the framework of the Cosmogonías del Tecnoceno [Cosmogonies of the Technocene] edition of the Fourth Latin American Festival of Arts and Technologies (2024), organized by the collective Toda la Teoría del Universo . It took place under the night sky at the Pedro del Río Zañartu Museum Park viewing platform in the city of Concepción, Chile.

This transmission began with a collective reading of the text Life Is Not Useful by Ailton Krenak, philosopher, Indigenous leader, and one of the most revelatory voices in contemporary Latin American thought. Krenak argues that awakening from the coma of modernity is awakening to the possibility of reimmersing oneself in the cosmic meaning of life. Through the modern Western project we have massacred the Earth, we have “torn it apart,” we have devastated it, and with it, ourselves. Recovering the cosmic meaning of life is remembering that “life moves through everything”—stones, mountains, rivers, plants, animals, insects, ancestors—and that life is “traversing the living organism of the planet on an immaterial scale.” Life does not consist of what we are able to plan and organize on a calendar, nor in working enough to be able to rest, nor in becoming a fulfilled person with an education and a high salary. Life, for Krenak, is about sustaining the fabric that connects the visible and invisible beings of this cosmos.

From this first collective springboard, artists Denise Alves-Rodrigues (BR), Elisa Balmaceda (CL), Susana Chau (CL), and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (CL) were invited to work in teams with the participants to collectively create a message to transmit to space, resulting in a single message that embraced the voices, longings, and desires of those present, along with sounds of other species (recorded by Uruguayan sound artist Juanita Fernández) and sounds from the environment.

Sending our collective voices into space in the form of light, the sounds that surround us—the birds, the sea, the wind, and our territories—invited us to immerse ourselves in the confines of outer space. We felt intimately and deeply connected to the Earth.

Third Transmission: Cosmic Twins

As the closing event of the Pumpumyachkan Festival in Peru, organized by Asimtria.org, a single heartbeat stirred our vibrations. Starting with a walk to the Vilcanota River from our headquarters in Yanahuara, we gathered to listen to our voices by the river to collectively generate a sound message to retransmit into space.

This river is a vital artery for the Cusco region. In the Andean worldview, the Apus (the sacred mountains) and Achachilas (the ancestors) are considered protective spirits of the Earth and its people. The Vilcanota River, as it flows through these sacred mountains, becomes a vital and cosmic connection between the Apus and human communities. Its flow sows life and memory in this sacred valley, which was our catalyst for rethinking the meaning of being Earthlings.

Under the starry sky and guided by the constellation of the Southern Cross, we gathered in a single invocation. We began with a collective reading of the chapter titled “Cosmic Twins” from Emanuele Coccia’s book Metamorphoses. It offered us insight into the fundamental interconnectedness and symbiosis that exists between all living beings and the cosmos. Coccia explores the idea that all elements of the universe are intimately and profoundly interconnected, reflecting a “cosmic twin” relationship in which each entity is a version or manifestation of another.

The Vilcanota River was an open portal for exploring possible cosmic meanings in the great web of life. A reminder, in Coccia’s words:

It is only because we are born that there is a world and not just a disparate set of objects. Birth is a double process, both parallel and simultaneous, shared by self and world. For it is not only the living being that is born: the world is also born, and born differently with the appearance of each new individual. Every birth is a twin birth: world and subject are heterozygous twins, born simultaneously,  impossible to define apart from one other. [7]

Taking a moment to think about matter unfolds the possibility of a new politics of dimension, where this performance between human and beyond-human bodies is entangled and interwoven in complex, nonhierarchical interscalarities ranging from the orders of a fern to a solar cycle. Our technical media, no matter how digital and ethereal they may seem, always have a material foundation, from our devices to communication systems, data mining, AI tools, and more. All of these supports are made up of the same minerals that make up most things on our planet, including our own bodies, albeit in different proportions; that is, everyone and everything once was and always will be soil.

Because We Are Already in the Future . . .

Today, the Anthropocene and its technosphere, expressed in the 30 trillion tons of anthropogenic infrastructure implanted on Earth’s sphere as a vast, mutating, transgenic, and electromagnetic system, exemplify modern Western cosmotechnics, where humans, through technology, dominate and shape nature according to their needs and desires. However, this universal, dominant, and capitalist technological logic has led us to a global ecological crisis, revealing its limitations while urgently requiring us to conceive new cosmotechnics that merge modern and ancestral knowledge. These technologies, beyond being mere physical tools, reveal the complexity and sophistication of other knowledge systems.

It is important to emphasize that these forms of knowledge are not merely empirical practices, but rather well-developed systems that integrate spiritual, ancestral, environmental, and community aspects. This expanded cosmotechnical vision even invites us to recognize nature’s own technologies, such as plant photosynthesis or the carbon cycle, as a planetary technical and metabolic mechanism.

The idea of ​​the world, of the Earth as a whole, associated with the old cosmopolitan regime of the global, is today confronted by a new cosmological image. A planetology that attempts to lay the foundations for an alternative cosmopolitanism, where the planetary represents an Earth understood as an impersonal process (geochemical, geological, and geophysical) and not as an object, or a scale, referring to a homogenizing and dominant vision of the “global.” A dynamic reality of folds and porosities of complex adaptive systems (such as the planetary hydrological cycle, carbon or nitrogen metabolisms, ecosystem food chains, etc.), where living things and things blur into a single, large terrestrial body. So, returning to Arturo Escobar, how can we design a pluriverse, a world that can accommodate many worlds?

The future, like a human compass, breaks its hands in the possibility of pluriversality. In this sense, Latin American futurology and speculation are essential for designing a neutral center of ideas. There is no future without explicit reference to the criteria of globality and will; therefore, we are not talking about science fiction. Foresight does not contemplate the future as a single extension of the past, because the future is open to the view of multiple vicissitudes—that is, the combination and balance between foresight and action.

Qhip nayra uñtasis sarnaqapxañani is an Aymara aphorism that Bolivian activist and sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui interprets as follows: “By looking to the future/past, we can move toward the present/future.” In other words, we can only reach the hereafter by facing the past and with the future at our back.

——

[1] Armando José Quijano Vodniza, “Las Pléyades y el calendario agrario y ritual de los incas,” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 59, no. 2 (2023).

[2] Christine A. Hastorf, “The actions and meanings of visible and hidden spaces at Formative Chiripa,” Ñawpa Pacha 37, no. 2 (2017): 133.

[3] The term Technocene was coined by the Argentinian sociologist Flavia Costa in her book Tecnoceno: La dominación digital, sus consecuencias y la reacción posible [Technocene: Digital Domination, It’s Consequences, and Possible Reactions]. According to Costa, the Technocene is a new era in which technology has become the main force molding and dominating our society, culture, and environment. The author maintains that we live in an era in which technology has reached an unprecedented level of power, and that it has radically transformed our world. We can speak about a new world, in terms of modernity, where nothing similar has existed before and its effects have an unequaled speed and scale; for example, climate change.

[4] Collaborative text by Radicante crew members, 2023.

[5] Gabriela Munguía, “Primera transmisión sonora en forma de luz al espacio” [First sound transmission to space in the form of light] filmed 2023. 

[6] Editor’s note: The author drew from the book Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo [Ideas for Postponing the End of the World] by the Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak, published in July 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil by Companhia das Letras.

[7] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021).