Spaced features a monologue by a cosmic cloud imbued with a personality, a distorted human eye and mouth. Alien in its appearance, the cloud speaks of its astral travels reflecting more human anxieties about the here and now. The voice is accompanied by a soundtrack derived from NASA recordings of deep space.

Spaced is part of a series of works of the same name that interweave the history of space exploration with more everyday human concerns. Gravity becomes a metaphor for mundane aspects of life – work, death, taxes – and, freed from these concerns the cosmic cloud explores transcendental ideas that emerge from the universal forces it is subjected to instead.

Oursler’s uncanny works invest consciousness into common-or-garden objects that frequently appear discarded, overlooked or cast adrift in the world. By relatively simple means of projecting abject faces and personalities onto such inanimate objects, the artist creates a fantastical, sometimes comic, sometimes nightmarish, set of relations between inner and outer space.