Aug 12, 2026
Who gets to imagine humanity's future beyond Earth, and who gets left out?
In Episode 2 of Dances with Robots, host Ariane Michaud sits down with Nahum, artist and founder of the Kosmica Institute, and interdisciplinary artist Sage Ni'Ja Whitson to pose a question the space sector rarely asks of itself: not why we go, but who the going is for.
Space has always had gatekeepers. From the agencies and billionaires who set the agenda to the cultural assumptions we pack along with the cargo, the story of leaving Earth has mostly been written by a very few. Engaging with Afrofuturism and speculative performance, Nahum and Whitson work in a longer lineage of artists who insist that story can be told otherwise: that a future off-planet could be built on care, imagination, and collective responsibility rather than conquest.
This episode of Dances with Robots is supported by The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University and is co-produced by Consciously Produced.
Visit are.na/choreographicinterfaces for the show notes to this episode.