Kris Paulsen’s essay, “The Impossible Now: Limit Telepresence and Robotic Entanglement on Mars,” has been published in ARTCHAE. For a Media Ar(t)chaeology of Telepresence (Milano University Press, 2026), edited by Barbara Grespi, Miriam De Rosa, Maria Teresa Soldani, and Lorenzo Lazzari.
Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art and Film Studies at The Ohio State University, develops the concept of “limit telepresence” in relation to Mars: a condition in which the delay between Earth and the rover makes real-time co-presence impossible. She argues that this delay renders explicit something inherent in telepresence more generally: that the mediated “now” is, in some sense, already “then.”
Tracing these questions through a range of historical, technological and artistic contexts, the essay includes an extended discussion of the film The Other Side of Mars and the three-channel installation Photons of Mars. Paulsen considers the aesthetic, emotional and subjective dimensions of our mediated presence on Mars in the film, and reads the installation’s three-channel structure as more than a display format: a temporal machine that lets the viewer move between “here and there, now, then, and not yet,” making their own cuts across different temporal and spatial registers.