What It Needs

Alien Worlds arrives with its scientists, eight finished worlds, a publishing and exhibition record, and three tracks in motion. What it lacks is permanence.

What it brings

• Eight worlds complete, with their films, essays and fiction
• Nine scientists and five novelists already committed
• The Proxima Kósmos anthology, in discussion with MIT Press
• An exhibition history and a press record
• Three research tracks running, and a fourth opening in January

What it asks

• A host whose own timescale matches the thing the project is trying to think about
• A line for the program: $141,000 to $362,000 a year, carrying three to four worlds
• An institutional name to publish and convene under
• An address for the archive — the renders, the ProRes masters, the essays, the correspondence

What a host gets

A method, not a theme. Alien Worlds manufactures cases that do not exist yet and cannot be gathered from the field, and then makes them public in a form people actually read. It is a way of doing the speculative half of a science without asking anybody to stop being a scientist.

The first detection of life beyond Earth will not be made by an instrument alone. It will be made by someone who already knew what to call the thing the instrument found.