Interdisciplinary Aerocultural Inquiry
The Center employs methods from cultural history, folklore studies, media theory, and design research to trace how the idea of “the sky” operates as both material environment and cultural construct. Our approach values mythic, speculative, and technological objects and narratives equally as cultural evidence.
Archival Imagination
We practice an expanded archival method, combining traditional research in print, film, and artifact collections with digital, informal and emergent archives such as fan works, aviation ephemera, and digital-first media. This approach repositions imaginative and vernacular records as legitimate sites of cultural memory.
Cloudcraft Design Practice
Our creative work aims to transform research insights into visual, narrative, and participatory forms (e.g. games, exhibitions, or workshops). This method tests how myth and media co-produce meaning about the sky, integrating aesthetic practice with scholarship.
Comparative Aeromythologies
Each project situates contemporary sky narratives such as UFO discourse, atmospheric photography, or flight simulation within longer mythic genealogies of ascent, visitation, and transcendence. Diachronic and comparative analysis reveals continuities between ancient aeromyths and modern aerotechnologies.
Public Scholarship through Creative Praxis
The Center views cultural research as a civic and imaginative act. Through journals, workshops, and exhibitions, we translate aerocultural study into accessible formats that invite public participation, reframing the sky as a shared, evolving cultural frontier.
The Center for Sky Studies applies interdisciplinary methods for examining the cultural imagination of the sky. Our work integrates historical research, field documentation, and creative translation to reveal how myth, media, and technology shape ongoing human-sky relationships.
Primary and secondary sources are gathered across multiple domains: aviation and aerospace history, folklore, speculative fiction, visual culture, and material design. This includes print archives, digital collections, personal papers, oral histories, and vernacular media such as fanzines, online forums, and ephemera. Each item will be annotated for its symbolic, technological, and narrative relevance to the evolving idea of the sky.
Collected materials are analyzed for recurring motifs (e.g. ascension, visitation, fall, guidance, surveillance, transformation, etc.) and positioned within a broader aeromythological framework. This process identifies continuities between ancient mythic tropes and contemporary aerotechnical imaginaries, producing taxonomies and diagrams that serve as both analytical and aesthetic instruments.
Research crosses disciplinary boundaries to examine how different media (film, literature, music, visual art, simulation, and digital culture) translate the experience of flight. The Center approaches these media as narrative technologies, tracing how each reinterprets the sky through its own sensory and symbolic language.
Design functions as a methodological extension of research. Using visual and narrative synthesis, findings are translated into exhibitions, printed works, digital artifacts, and participatory experiences. This practice, currently termed aeromythography design, allows cultural theory to become materially legible and publicly encountered. Examples include the Cryptid Candles project, Clear Skies fan expansion for Sky Team, and the developing Star Wars Day speeder-bike parade.