| During 80 years from 1788 to 1868, about 164,000 convicts were exiled to Australia on board 806 prison ships. These men and women were often used as penal labor in penal colonies. Some of them never arrived in Australia; others suffered from hunger, thirst, and lack of any form of health security. Shipping prisoners to exile is an historical trend in forms of social punishment.;From the beginning of the so-called "space age," the promise of space investors was often better conditions for human life. The image of space exploration is adventurous and glorious and it even found its way into our cultural entertainments. The forerunners of space programs consider the human inhabitation of space as the only solution to prevent our species' extinction. Although after the so-called space race, the propagation of this image has been reduced but outer space inhabitation has still its place in projected images of our future.;Space exploration and social punishment, though seemingly unrelated, share an important property and that is their existence in our images of future. It may possibly bring them into a common ground. Thinking about fictional scenarios of punishment in the context of outer space inhabitation emerges serious issues and problems that should be projected and addressed not merely from a problem-solving point of view but from a provoking one.;The main questions of this thesis are "How mechanisms of social punishment will look and work in the age of human space exploration?" and "What will be the interactions between these mechanisms and human life?". This thesis does not seek to solve problems. Its goal is to craft and ask questions, provoke criticism, and finally catalyze dialogues about futures yet to come. It will use principles of experimental futures to form a critical fiction story and design the stuff that may be associated with this. It will finally mediate the stories using a narrative form and represent them through performance. |
