THE TAPESTRY OF THE SEARCH FOR TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
By Ranjit Bhatnagar (US)
In 1977, the two Voyager space probes were launched, each carrying a golden record with music, sounds, and voices from Earth — just in case. The records also feature over a hundred digital images encoded as sounds. If an alien civilization picked up one of the Voyager probes a million years from now, what would they make of the information on the record? They probably wouldn't think they way we do. They might try to taste the disk, or try to find meaning in the way it feels when they rub their fingers on the grooves. Or they might try to decode the ancient, degraded images onto a forty-metre-long tapestry.
The actual information used by the artist to make The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence came from a fuzzy, distorted copy of the Voyager golden record found on YouTube. A friend of the artist noticed that before the recordings of human voices, music, and nature sounds, there was three minutes of weird electronic beeps. The artist realized that those must be the digital images, and used simple software techniques to recover the pictures. Because the video was a low quality copy of a copy of a copy, the pictures came out twisted and full of static in a haunting way that made the artist think of how a faint transmission might be received by aliens many years in the future.
BIO
Ranjit is a sound artist who works with technology, language, and found materials to create interactive installations and musical instruments. His works have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe. In 2017, Ranjit worked with Ad Hoc Art Collective to build a large-scale musical installation in Denmark, and he has worked with New Orleans Airlift to build several tiny musical houses. His heaviest work is Stone Song, a 7,500-pound outdoor sound sculpture; his lightest is Pentametron, a Twitter poetry miner made of code.