Speaker: Larissa Belcic, Masters Candidate, Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
Contact: Shana Rabinowich, shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair: Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
The main body of the talk will share documentation from a month in summer 2015 spent on the Big Island of Hawaii as a participant-observer with a team testing the capabilities of a lunar rover developed by the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES). The terrestrial analog test site was temporarily constructed approximately 7,000 feet down the summit of Mauna Kea, where a tense battle for indigenous land use rights was taking place against the backdrop of the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Playlist from the Terrestrial Analog composes a depiction of the testing process through the layering of media, moment and object, aiming to find the roots of an extra-terrestrial ecology of human colonization through regarding the fullness and strangeness of its simulation.
Biography:
Larissa Belcic is currently at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she is working towards her master’s in landscape architecture. She holds a BA in linguistics and a minor in studio art from Boston College. Prior to coming to the GSD, she worked in civic engagement with a range of communities, from the elderly population of NYC to the city’s institutional art world. She also maintained an art practice, exploring intersections of personal psyche, technology, and architectural space through painting and digital media.
