Cultural WG webibar – Cave Art Continuum: Discovering Meaning in Human and Robotic Space Exploration

Join the Moon Village Association’s Cultural Considerations Working Group for a webinar with documentary photographer Michael Soluri exploring the connections between cave art, human creativity, and space exploration. Through his photographic work, Soluri examines the meaning, symbolism, and cultural legacy of space exploration, drawing parallels between ancient human expression and the tools, technologies, and artifacts of modern robotic and human missions.

Register for free

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FeD9LS09RGSrL152IgKtUQ

AGENDA

• Remo Rapetti: Welcome Address
• Christopher Cokinos: Introduction
• Michael Soluri: Cave Art Continuum: Discovering Meaning in Human and Robotic Space Exploration
• Lisa Pettibone: Q&A Session

Michael Soluri is a New York City and Alexandria, VA based documentary photographer. His practice explores obscure locations, micro work cultures and tools as sculpture by confounding representation through abstraction to investigate shape, form, meaning and memory.

His current analog film-based project, begun in 2009, is a meditation on the transcendence of time in context to the hidden surfaces and symbols under 1960’s era launchpads at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

He has begun Photographic Documentation of an Interplanetary Spacecraft as Sculpture — a two-year analogue and digital project that explores the representation of NASA’s “Dragonfly” one-of-a-kind components and tools as sculpture. Eight mural size images from his series on astronaut space tools as sculpture are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Soluri’s essay “Examining the Iconic and Rediscovering the Photography of Space Exploration in Context to the History of Photography” was published in Remembering the Space Age for the NASA History Office.

He is the author of Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration (Simon & Schuster).

“Cave Art Continuum” was recently profiled in Anne Barkin’s Berlin based Photo-Letter (June 2026).

Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory assigned the asteroid 2001 QL307 — orbiting between Mars and Jupiter — Soluri 187981.