Research
The Institute convenes transdisciplinary research, supporting scientific and also cultural and creative approaches, to reveal fresh strategies. Focusing on alternatives to extractive space futures, we explore policy, philosophy, adaptation, and readiness that responds to climate breakdown, the emerging space industry and eco-social transformations.
Research that explores long-term and large-scale patterns needs to grow from historical understandings; both the deep time of culture and media, and respect for the varieties of knowledge about the planet and stars that shape our current era. AE is also interested in emerging and speculative methods—from ecology, arts, technologies, governance—that may reveal plural ways onwards.
Network
The network, held in Aotearoa (New Zealand), originally launched as a community initiative with the goal of making contemporary ecological research more accessible through the pandemic. The Astro Ecologies Institute expanded this aim into a loose network of scientists, researchers, and creatives, collectively curious about fresh approaches to healthy futures for Earth and thinking on an astro ecological scale.
Moving beyond extractive visions of space exploration, our Cosmoimaginaries programme opened in June 2023, offering a free and open learning programme on ecological methods, outer space, astrobiology and the more-than-human, working with science, art, ethnography, archaeology, and storytelling. Through live in-person events, and an online speaker programmes, we invite audiences into scientific, cultural, and creative dialogues, focusing on Earth's place within broader ecological processes of the universe. Across exhibitions, workshops and reading groups we continued to explore questions of communication, life, and SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with a learning community connecting from around the planet.
With strong connections across Oceania, the Institute is committed to accessible public engagement through events, workshops, and exhibitions. Art Science and creative methods expand restricted and reductive understandings and definitions of life, cosmos and communication. Creative methods, art workshops and exhibitions open up the questions of the Universe through more creative modes of feeling, sensing and perceiving. Relational and poetic techniques meet the pressing issues of an era of profound systems change with curiosity, making room for diverse ways of knowing and being.
Home Contact
The Astro Ecologies Institute, founded in 2020, combines ecological research and astrophysics, developing connections across ecologies, technologies, science and society in the emerging space age.
Research
The Institute convenes transdisciplinary research, supporting scientific and also cultural and creative approaches, to reveal ecological strategies for science and knowledge, with a focus on the theme of communication and cosmos. We explore science, policy, philosophy, adaptation, and readiness that responds to climate breakdown. Focusing on alternatives to extractive space futures, research shares emerging methods and practices that hold different kinds of relations for earth and outer space.
We do this work by looking to the roots—to the origins of life and the deep time of media and cultures that shape our current technological era—whilst looking to the future, with an openness to speculative and process-based methods that approach wicked problems in fresh ways.
Network
The network, held in Aotearoa (New Zealand), originally launched as a community initiative to make ecological and outer space research more accessible. The Astro Ecologies Institute expanded into a network of scientists, researchers, and creatives connecting across the planet, with a communal curiosity to grow an ecological knowledge culture to meet the complexity of what is emerging.