‍Venus Does Not Exist" investigates our relationship with remote environments as visual and tactile concepts. Addressing NASA's 1989 Magellan mission, which mapped Venus via Synthetic Aperture Radar, the research questions how technologies shape our collective imagination of unreachable landscapes and delves into philosophies of first contact and radical imagination.
Radar technology, much like a knitting machine, generates a pixel-based landscape through an encoded touch—mapping the unseen by sending signals that return to form an image. As a textile artist, Michèle Boulogne critiques colonial narratives in space exploration by reinterpreting Venusian imagery.

Using collection of coded knits created on a STOLL flatbed machine and a visual archive, she aim to build a more empathetic and dimensional understanding of Venus. This project suggests new methods for remote sensing, envisioning a multidimensional relationship with Venus and proposing geographies free from colonial influence.
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‍"Are there techniques to incorporate into remote sensing technology that will eliminate the process of colonisation in order to explore Venus’s surfaces?
This selection from the material collection is a start to a more engaging understanding of space exploration.