"It’s one thing to build a hypothetical starship—it’s another to actually try living in it. “From the second version of Seeker onward, we started organizing actual isolation missions, like pre-hearsals of the future,” says Vermeulen. “Doing this totally changes the dynamic of the design process — it gives the work a performative quality. For Seeker in Ljubljana, Slovenia, we tested our speculative construction by locking ourselves up for four days with six team members,” he says. “We stayed inside the art work in the museum, even at night after the guards had left.”
Isolation missions are part of Vermeulen’s interest in possible social structures and governance for interstellar communities—particularly distributed and self-organized decision making as opposed to traditional military-style command. “During the isolation mission in Ljubljana, we had a crew member who’d served in the Yugoslav army during the war. As we discussed how military command works, the ex-soldier shared his experiences with us, and it was chilling,” says Vermeulen. “He was very much against military structure because it psychologically discourages people from connecting. The main goal, he said, is to make sure a commander can give orders to individuals because communities are threatening: they are strong, can voice an opinion and rise up.”
Kind of giving everyone ownership of the future, not just for NASA engineers.
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