“Escaping Earth” is a performance borrowing elements from video game live streaming and Let’s Play formats. Eren İleri plays Kerbal Space Program video game by Squad and over the course of the performance reads texts on ethics of spaceflight, critical posthumanisms, cosmogony, mutual aid and escape narratives.

Kerbal Space Program is a popular space flight simulation video game where players direct “a space program staffed and crewed by green humanoid aliens known as Kerbals”. The game allows players to create and operate their own rockets, spacecraft et al, using a wide selection of parts available in the game and the player can conduct realistic spaceflight missions featuring complicated orbital maneuvers.

“Escaping Earth” is a continuation of Eren’s previous work “Indigenous Martian Bacteria DO Have Precedence Over Human Exploration: An Exercise in No Man’s Sky”, together constituting a series of video game live streaming performances.

Eren Ileri is an artist and researcher, working with photography, found material, video games and artist books. He co-founded the artist collective YxS KOOP which organized and participated in public interventions, workshops and exhibitions in Istanbul, Berlin, Vienna and Sinop. He is one half of Well Gedacht Publishing, a DIY publishing house dedicated to artist’s publications in various forms. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In his doctoral research Eren focuses on disembodied masculinity in the context of outer space exploration in contemporary SF video games.