Does getting away from it all now include our own planet? When we arrive at ‘away,’ what collective baggage will we carry with us? Whose imaginations are we living within? 

Marsification, a concept album in 16 vignettes, is an audio artwork that invites you to float in the zero gravity of astrocolonial dreams and the nightmares that fuel them.  An exploration and critique of techno-utopian fantasies of Mars colonization while we simultaneously destroy our home planet. This album is an offering of “critical feeling” at a pivotal time on our home planet. 

Co-created with Lily Sloane, extraordinary audio artist. Creative contributions and voicing by Chelsea Kigano. Neologisms from various collaborations with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Delightful website design by Hunter Rook, Ben Ward and Lily Sloane. 

Marsification is a term I co-created with my partner Patrick Reinsborough and the BLR. This neologism  critiques claims that the colonization of Mars is a viable strategy for dealing with the ecological crisis on Earth. The term presents the broader techno-utopian ideology which embraces space colonization as an extension of worldviews such as Manifest Destiny and the logic that drives ecocide. The full definition, also of Marsify (verb), is here. With its different definitions and dimensions, this term serves as an overarching theme for the album to explore complex terrestrial longing, planetary grief, funded denial and the recurring compulsion of colonial fantasy.

Marsification (noun)

• The expansion of colonial fantasy beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. “Manifest Destiny to the stars”. It is an extension of the phenomena of colonizing ‘new lands’ often accompanied by narratives of starting life anew, a civilizational reset, an apparent freedom from the social and political problems colonizers believe they are “leaving behind.”
• The various cultural, political and economic processes through which techno-utopian fantasies divert our attention from the dominant global economic system’s erosion of the life-support systems of Earth.
• The drive to turn relatively lifeless Mars into a new Earth while effectively turning biodiverse Earth into Mars. The process of making Mars habitable while Earth is being rendered increasingly inhabitable.
• The delusion that the blank slate of the red planet will be an escape from inescapable problems on our home planet. For example, the idea that humans could escape to Mars if we destroy our own climate.