Lisa Messeri
Biographic Data
| ID | 118292 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Messeri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Messeri |
| SIGNATURE | MESSERI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0964-123X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Visions of Computing Futures: Meta, Apple, and the Technological Fictions of Digitally Real Worlds
The vision of seamlessly integrating virtual and physical environments—variously called spatial computing and the metaverse—has been around for decades. Recently, Big Tech companies, including Apple and Meta, have prioritized ushering in this computing paradigm. Despite hardware and interface inadequacies, how do these companies make such visions feel not only inevitable but also readily achievable? This paper analyzes performances of corporate v…
Putting Big Tech in its place: A view of the virtual from Los Angeles
This article considers how ideas about technology take on distinct and divergent meanings in different centers of power. Through a study of the virtual reality (VR) community in Los Angeles, I identify concepts and ideas that seem to immutably travel between LA and San Francisco's Silicon Valley but that through ethnographic examination reveal flexible, local meanings. VR's charismatic identification as an empathy machine, connections between sto…
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of a contemporary community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality, believing that it could remedy society’s ills.
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
Alerta! Engineering on shaky ground By ElizabethReddy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 215 pp
Science communication with generative AI
Teaching with ChatGPT: Critiquing Generative Artificial Intelligence from the Classroom
Notes1. Over the past few years, these technologies each had moments of promise. Facebook rebranded to Meta to hype up “the metaverse”—an immersive virtual world—as the successor to the internet. One of the presumed technologies enabling the metaverse was the blockchain, whose best-known application is cryptocurrency. NFTs experienced a bubble of interest and also served to inflate crypto, because NFTs are blockchain technologies. Significantly, …
Faire entrer des mondes en résonance: La planétologie en quête d’expériences du proche
Les planétologues ont la capacité de produire des savoirs sur des objets situés très loin de leur expérience du temps et de l'espace. Ceux-ci parviennent parfois, dans un contexte expérimental donné, à surmonter cette incommensurabilité en attribuant à la Terre le statut de planète analogue, substituable à d'autres mondes. Faire l'expérience de la Terre revient ainsi à faire l'expérience d'une autre planète. Quand certains scientifiques finissent…
Realities of illusion: Tracing an anthropology of the unreal from Torres Strait to virtual reality
This article examines how perceptual illusions become reliable markers of truth in the context of experimental psychology. As laboratory tools, illusions travel across time, place, and media: from the Torres Strait expedition at the close of the nineteenth century to a contemporary psychology lab that utilizes virtual reality. In this historical and ethnographic study, something that might otherwise be considered misleading (illusion) becomes an …
Greetings from Silicon Beach
Gestures of Cosmic Relation and the Search for Another Earth
Astronomers searching for an Earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy imagine the significance of such a discovery. They tell each other a story about pointing to the star around which such an exoplanet exists and knowing with certainty that there is a world upon which humans could comfortably live. The story, told in white papers, at scientific conferences, and to broader publics, features a mother astronomer explaining to her children the pote…
Resonant worlds: Cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science
Planetary scientists are adept at producing knowledge about objects that are far removed from their lived experience of place and time. Sometimes, they overcome this distance by positioning Earth as a planet that can stand for other worlds. Encountering Earth becomes an encounter with another planet. When scientists experience the Earthly as otherworldly, they sometimes feel an excitement here described as "resonance." Fully felt resonance is rar…
Extra-terra incognita: Martian maps in the digital age
Science and technology studies (STS) and critical cartography are both asking questions about the ontological fixity of maps and other scientific objects. This paper examines how a group of NASA computer scientists who call themselves The Mapmakers conceptualizes and creates maps in service of different commitments. The maps under construction are those of alien Mars, produced through partnerships that NASA has established with Google and Microso…
Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars by Erik M. Conway
Reviewed by: Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars by Erik M. Conway Lisa Messeri (bio) Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars. By Erik M. Conway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. 416. $34.95. A few years ago, I interviewed an engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center who spoke to me about his first memory of Mars. He was a teenager when the Pathf…
Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds
Lisa Messeri's "Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds" explores how planetary scientists and engineers construct knowledge about other planets. Through ethnographic fieldwork at NASA's Mars rover operations, astronomical observatories, and exoplanet labs, Messeri examines the practices, technologies, and narratives that shape our understanding of places beyond Earth. She argues that outer space is not simply discovered but a…
The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the "Projectory" in Technological Communities
This article introduces the concept of the sociotechnical projectory to explore the importance of future-oriented discourse in technical practice. It examines the case of two flagship NASA missions that, since the 1960s, have been continually proposed and deferred. Despite the missions never being flown, it argues that they produced powerful effects within the planetary science community as assumed "end-points" to which all current technological,…
Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch
As "the Anthropocene" emerges as a geological term and environmental analytic, this paper examines its emerging rhetorical topology. We show that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an "inner" and "outer" environment. This division situates an Anthropocenic environment that matters in the surface zone between Earth's subsurface and the extraterrestrial "outer spaces" that we address here. We review literature in the scien…
Standards in the space industry: Looking back, looking forward
Spaceflight is ingrained in the imagination as a state-of-the-art technology. Its level of sophistication and intricacy is unparalleled.The space industry, with its large budgets and few producers, has been able to maintain a craft mentality in the face of the hi-tech ethos of mass production. One striking example of this craft mentality is a relative lack of industry-wide standards for the design and operation of satellites. This article discuss…
The Problem with Pluto: Conflicting Cosmologies and the Classification of Planets
In 2006, for the first time in its history, the International Astronomical Union defined the characteristics of a ‘planet’ in our Solar System and consequently demoted Pluto from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’. Scientific and popular discussion leading up to and following the formal definition of planet demonstrated that astronomers, amateurs, educators, and school children had been employing Pluto in different ways to construct multiple scientific a…
Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch
As "the Anthropocene" emerges as a geological term and environmental analytic, this paper examines its emerging rhetorical topology. We show that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an "inner" and "outer" environment. This division situates an Anthropocenic environment that matters in the surface zone between Earth's subsurface and the extraterrestrial "outer spaces" that we address here. We review literature in the scien…
Resonant worlds: Cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science
Planetary scientists are adept at producing knowledge about objects that are far removed from their lived experience of place and time. Sometimes, they overcome this distance by positioning Earth as a planet that can stand for other worlds. Encountering Earth becomes an encounter with another planet. When scientists experience the Earthly as otherworldly, they sometimes feel an excitement here described as "resonance." Fully felt resonance is rar…
Gestures of Cosmic Relation and the Search for Another Earth
Astronomers searching for an Earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy imagine the significance of such a discovery. They tell each other a story about pointing to the star around which such an exoplanet exists and knowing with certainty that there is a world upon which humans could comfortably live. The story, told in white papers, at scientific conferences, and to broader publics, features a mother astronomer explaining to her children the pote…
Extra-terra incognita: Martian maps in the digital age
Science and technology studies (STS) and critical cartography are both asking questions about the ontological fixity of maps and other scientific objects. This paper examines how a group of NASA computer scientists who call themselves The Mapmakers conceptualizes and creates maps in service of different commitments. The maps under construction are those of alien Mars, produced through partnerships that NASA has established with Google and Microso…
Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds
Lisa Messeri's "Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds" explores how planetary scientists and engineers construct knowledge about other planets. Through ethnographic fieldwork at NASA's Mars rover operations, astronomical observatories, and exoplanet labs, Messeri examines the practices, technologies, and narratives that shape our understanding of places beyond Earth. She argues that outer space is not simply discovered but a…
Realities of illusion: Tracing an anthropology of the unreal from Torres Strait to virtual reality
This article examines how perceptual illusions become reliable markers of truth in the context of experimental psychology. As laboratory tools, illusions travel across time, place, and media: from the Torres Strait expedition at the close of the nineteenth century to a contemporary psychology lab that utilizes virtual reality. In this historical and ethnographic study, something that might otherwise be considered misleading (illusion) becomes an …
Science communication with generative AI
The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the "Projectory" in Technological Communities
This article introduces the concept of the sociotechnical projectory to explore the importance of future-oriented discourse in technical practice. It examines the case of two flagship NASA missions that, since the 1960s, have been continually proposed and deferred. Despite the missions never being flown, it argues that they produced powerful effects within the planetary science community as assumed "end-points" to which all current technological,…
The Problem with Pluto: Conflicting Cosmologies and the Classification of Planets
In 2006, for the first time in its history, the International Astronomical Union defined the characteristics of a ‘planet’ in our Solar System and consequently demoted Pluto from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’. Scientific and popular discussion leading up to and following the formal definition of planet demonstrated that astronomers, amateurs, educators, and school children had been employing Pluto in different ways to construct multiple scientific a…
Putting Big Tech in its place: A view of the virtual from Los Angeles
This article considers how ideas about technology take on distinct and divergent meanings in different centers of power. Through a study of the virtual reality (VR) community in Los Angeles, I identify concepts and ideas that seem to immutably travel between LA and San Francisco's Silicon Valley but that through ethnographic examination reveal flexible, local meanings. VR's charismatic identification as an empathy machine, connections between sto…
Teaching with ChatGPT: Critiquing Generative Artificial Intelligence from the Classroom
Notes1. Over the past few years, these technologies each had moments of promise. Facebook rebranded to Meta to hype up “the metaverse”—an immersive virtual world—as the successor to the internet. One of the presumed technologies enabling the metaverse was the blockchain, whose best-known application is cryptocurrency. NFTs experienced a bubble of interest and also served to inflate crypto, because NFTs are blockchain technologies. Significantly, …
Standards in the space industry: Looking back, looking forward
Spaceflight is ingrained in the imagination as a state-of-the-art technology. Its level of sophistication and intricacy is unparalleled.The space industry, with its large budgets and few producers, has been able to maintain a craft mentality in the face of the hi-tech ethos of mass production. One striking example of this craft mentality is a relative lack of industry-wide standards for the design and operation of satellites. This article discuss…
Standards in the space industry: Looking back, looking forward
Spaceflight is ingrained in the imagination as a state-of-the-art technology. Its level of sophistication and intricacy is unparalleled.The space industry, with its large budgets and few producers, has been able to maintain a craft mentality in the face of the hi-tech ethos of mass production. One striking example of this craft mentality is a relative lack of industry-wide standards for the design and operation of satellites. This article discuss…
The Problem with Pluto: Conflicting Cosmologies and the Classification of Planets
In 2006, for the first time in its history, the International Astronomical Union defined the characteristics of a ‘planet’ in our Solar System and consequently demoted Pluto from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’. Scientific and popular discussion leading up to and following the formal definition of planet demonstrated that astronomers, amateurs, educators, and school children had been employing Pluto in different ways to construct multiple scientific a…
The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the "Projectory" in Technological Communities
This article introduces the concept of the sociotechnical projectory to explore the importance of future-oriented discourse in technical practice. It examines the case of two flagship NASA missions that, since the 1960s, have been continually proposed and deferred. Despite the missions never being flown, it argues that they produced powerful effects within the planetary science community as assumed "end-points" to which all current technological,…
Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch
As "the Anthropocene" emerges as a geological term and environmental analytic, this paper examines its emerging rhetorical topology. We show that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an "inner" and "outer" environment. This division situates an Anthropocenic environment that matters in the surface zone between Earth's subsurface and the extraterrestrial "outer spaces" that we address here. We review literature in the scien…
Extra-terra incognita: Martian maps in the digital age
Science and technology studies (STS) and critical cartography are both asking questions about the ontological fixity of maps and other scientific objects. This paper examines how a group of NASA computer scientists who call themselves The Mapmakers conceptualizes and creates maps in service of different commitments. The maps under construction are those of alien Mars, produced through partnerships that NASA has established with Google and Microso…
Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars by Erik M. Conway
Reviewed by: Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars by Erik M. Conway Lisa Messeri (bio) Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars. By Erik M. Conway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. 416. $34.95. A few years ago, I interviewed an engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center who spoke to me about his first memory of Mars. He was a teenager when the Pathf…
Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds
Lisa Messeri's "Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds" explores how planetary scientists and engineers construct knowledge about other planets. Through ethnographic fieldwork at NASA's Mars rover operations, astronomical observatories, and exoplanet labs, Messeri examines the practices, technologies, and narratives that shape our understanding of places beyond Earth. She argues that outer space is not simply discovered but a…
Gestures of Cosmic Relation and the Search for Another Earth
Astronomers searching for an Earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy imagine the significance of such a discovery. They tell each other a story about pointing to the star around which such an exoplanet exists and knowing with certainty that there is a world upon which humans could comfortably live. The story, told in white papers, at scientific conferences, and to broader publics, features a mother astronomer explaining to her children the pote…
Resonant worlds: Cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science
Planetary scientists are adept at producing knowledge about objects that are far removed from their lived experience of place and time. Sometimes, they overcome this distance by positioning Earth as a planet that can stand for other worlds. Encountering Earth becomes an encounter with another planet. When scientists experience the Earthly as otherworldly, they sometimes feel an excitement here described as "resonance." Fully felt resonance is rar…
Greetings from Silicon Beach
Faire entrer des mondes en résonance: La planétologie en quête d’expériences du proche
Les planétologues ont la capacité de produire des savoirs sur des objets situés très loin de leur expérience du temps et de l'espace. Ceux-ci parviennent parfois, dans un contexte expérimental donné, à surmonter cette incommensurabilité en attribuant à la Terre le statut de planète analogue, substituable à d'autres mondes. Faire l'expérience de la Terre revient ainsi à faire l'expérience d'une autre planète. Quand certains scientifiques finissent…
Realities of illusion: Tracing an anthropology of the unreal from Torres Strait to virtual reality
This article examines how perceptual illusions become reliable markers of truth in the context of experimental psychology. As laboratory tools, illusions travel across time, place, and media: from the Torres Strait expedition at the close of the nineteenth century to a contemporary psychology lab that utilizes virtual reality. In this historical and ethnographic study, something that might otherwise be considered misleading (illusion) becomes an …
Teaching with ChatGPT: Critiquing Generative Artificial Intelligence from the Classroom
Notes1. Over the past few years, these technologies each had moments of promise. Facebook rebranded to Meta to hype up “the metaverse”—an immersive virtual world—as the successor to the internet. One of the presumed technologies enabling the metaverse was the blockchain, whose best-known application is cryptocurrency. NFTs experienced a bubble of interest and also served to inflate crypto, because NFTs are blockchain technologies. Significantly, …
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of a contemporary community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality, believing that it could remedy society’s ills.
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
Alerta! Engineering on shaky ground By ElizabethReddy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 215 pp
Science communication with generative AI
Putting Big Tech in its place: A view of the virtual from Los Angeles
This article considers how ideas about technology take on distinct and divergent meanings in different centers of power. Through a study of the virtual reality (VR) community in Los Angeles, I identify concepts and ideas that seem to immutably travel between LA and San Francisco's Silicon Valley but that through ethnographic examination reveal flexible, local meanings. VR's charismatic identification as an empathy machine, connections between sto…
Visions of Computing Futures: Meta, Apple, and the Technological Fictions of Digitally Real Worlds
The vision of seamlessly integrating virtual and physical environments—variously called spatial computing and the metaverse—has been around for decades. Recently, Big Tech companies, including Apple and Meta, have prioritized ushering in this computing paradigm. Despite hardware and interface inadequacies, how do these companies make such visions feel not only inevitable but also readily achievable? This paper analyzes performances of corporate v…
Computer Science (10 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Engineering (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life (5 works) · Astrobiology (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Physics (4 works)