One of the pieces of art orbiting is by Badger native Adrianna Knouf who now lives in Boston where she’s a professor and artist.

It launched on March 6, 2020.

Knouf, who graduated from Fort Dodge Senior High in 1998 under the name Nicholas Knouf, has been in transition from male to female.

The piece, called TX-1, speaks to that experience.

-Submitted photo
Adriana Knouf’s creation, called TX-1, includes fragments of her hormone replacement therapy and a small paper sculpture inside three small resin spheres. The piece is currently in orbit on the International Space Station.

“TX-1 includes fragments of my hormone replacement medications encased in resin spheres,” she said. “It marks the first known time that a transgender artist created artwork for space.”

TX-1, along with other pieces in the Sojourner 2020 project, will circle the earth for about a month and will ultimately return to the planet’s surface.

Knouf said there’s symbolism in that as well.

“TX-1 is a symbolic exodus to an orbit high above and its eventual return to earth is a sign of resilience, of not being disposed, of coming back to thrive again,” she said.

The actual art works are quite tiny, each resin sphere is about 4 or 5 millimeters in diameter. Those are in turn enclosed in a clear plastic cylinder with the lid affixed with small machine screws.

-Submitted photo
Adriana Knouf’s sculpture TX-1 is shown before the spheres were put into their plastic container.

The whole thing is about the size of a 35mm film can.

Each sphere contains something different.

Two of them contain medication fragments, the third, “A miniature paper sculpture.”

It’s very much a way for Knouf to help combat stereotypes and discrimination.

“The enchanting Earth is too often made inhospitable to those marked as transgender,” she said. “To survive we xenomogrify ( change form ) ourselves through social and biological technologies, altering our surfaces, our viscera, our molecular balances,” she said. “None of us have been to space even if we possess somatic knowledge of deep bodily transformations, necessary experiences for extraterrestrial environments.”

Knouf said the work was selected through the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative’s first international artwork open call which also provided the launch opportunity.