Space Travel by Any Means Necessary investigates independent space exploration as an artistic and political act. Drawing from the 1990s Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), the project asks: who has access to “space,” and how can it be imagined beyond corporate and state control?

The AAA was an international network of artists, activists, and theorists, most active in the mid-1990s, who reimagined space travel as a symbolic and political practice rather than a corporate endeavour. Founded in 1995, the AAA operated during the early internet era and alongside post–Cold War debates on privatisation and globalisation. Its activities included distributing NASA-inspired false data sheets, organising “space raves,” and producing mission statements, opinion pieces, and temporary events. With no central leadership, anyone could claim the title of autonomous astronaut. The AAA’s work spans inner space (consciousness and psychology), social space (new forms of community), media space (networks and the early internet), and urban space (temporary zones, squats, and performances).

This project extends the AAA’s ethos as a methodological framework, reactivating its strategies of institutional mimicry, speculative organisation, and decentralised participation. The project republishes the archival material into a performative, cyclical experiment: physical prints from the AAA archive are scanned, digitised, converted to audio via Slow Scan Television (SSTV), and then transmitted over FM radio. Signals can be received, decoded, and reconstituted as images, creating a distributed, participatory circulation that exists beyond terrestrial constraints.

By “sending” the archive into space, the project interrogates the corporatisation of space exploration, exploring the gap between billionaire-led programs and collective imaginaries. At one scale, the signal extends outward into space, engaging with the conceptual idea of a boundless audience beyond Earth. On a more immediate level, it forms temporary communities of reception composed of people who encounter the project as a signal or fragment, participating in its decentralised and ephemeral distribution.

The work also speaks to the broader public, shaped by narratives of corporate and institutional space, and challenges dominant ideologies around technological progress and planetary escape. Finally, it engages individuals who are typically excluded from conventional or high-tech infrastructures, creating alternative points of access and participation that foreground autonomy, inclusivity, and imaginative engagement.