The Lonely Ones reimagines a short story by author Ray Bradbury, which describes the first human settlers on Mars and their shared experiences. Bradbury’s words reframe found footage shot by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area on the 9th of September 2020, when enormous amounts of wildfire smoke changed the colour of the sky to otherworldly orange hues. By joining a science fiction text together with collective documentation of an extreme weather event, the work envisions the Bay Area as an outer space analogue. Facing the current and projected effects of climate change, along with concerted efforts by leading space industry actors to build off-world futures, it responds to architect Buckminster Fuller’s idea that “we are already in space” and questions what it means to experience Earth—through human eyes—as an increasingly alien planet.
