Feeling Nature, Experiencing Knowledge, Making Futures The Planetariums of the 1920s

Presentation theme: future, sustainability, and worldviews

When the world’s first projection planetariums opened a hundred years ago, they mesmerized their audiences with a mixture of visual immersion, experience of nature, knowledge transfer and tales of the future. The carefully curated shows aroused strong emotions and raised big questions: Is life beyond planet Earth possible? Are we alone in space? And who actually owns the moon? This was associated with the impression of living on a small planet that was shrinking in perspective as part of a larges whole and that had to be protected. Based on the more than 900 sources that I compiled in the course of my doctoral thesis on the cultural history of the planetarium and from the perspective of cultural anthropology, I will take a look at the beginnings of the planetarium in this talk. I will explore how the first planetariums appealed to people emotionally, how they functioned as sites of the future and explore the question of what relationship to their world people came to know and cultivate there. Finally, this historical review also enables us to understand the planetarium as a site for current negotiations on the relationship between humans and our planet in the context of the climate crisis.

Image © Rosa Burczyk