Are we still anthropologists if we go to space using only our imaginations?

In this chapter, filmmakers/writers/anthropologists Ceridwen Dovey and Rowena Potts explore the value of ethnographic imagination and experimentation for an anthropology of outer space. Through critical reflections on the process of making the Outer Space Film Quartet, a series of short films co-created with their Archival Futures Collective film colleagues, Dovey and Potts explore some of the methods and approaches that shaped the emergence of each film. They identify an ethnographic method that is premised less on traditional fieldwork and relies more on activating an anthropological way of seeing. They challenge the reader to think of their films – which combine poetry, found footage, montage, and surrealistic, speculative elements – as producing an ethnography of the diverse landscapes in which outer space has been imagined, objectified, and finds expression; an ethnography of a particular range of human visual imaginations of outer space over time and across media.