GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS as an Epilogue of the Anthropocene Fragments for Future Intelligences
From October 12th to 14th, CAPAS participated in the performances of the artistic project GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS by matthaei&konsorten at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. The origins of this project go back to 1977, when NASA launched its "Golden Records" aboard the Voyager probes to preserve a snapshot of life on Earth for 500 million years. Curated by a small team, this "world self-portrait" featured retro-style photographs, classical music, and nature sounds, offering potential alien listeners a peculiar impression of humanity. The travelling GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS invites people around the world to rethink this message by asking: What should a new world portrait include, who should decide, and how do we want future intelligences to remember us?
Together with CAPAS Fellows Bruna Della Torre, Eduardo Altheman C. Santos, CAPAS Director Robert Folger, and team members Michael Dunn and Melanie Le Touze, the audience explored which scientific and apocalyptic insights might be remembered in the future. The project raises epistemic questions, examining what we know, how we know it, and who determines this knowledge. CAPAS also had the opportunity to interview Lukas Matthaei from matthaei&konsorten to learn more about the artistic vision behind this endeavor.
The GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS project engages with themes like memory, the future, and perhaps even survival. What inspired you to create this project?
Lukas Matthaei: The GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS began for me personally a few years ago, when I started to look deeper into NASA’s Voyager project from the late 1970s. I was teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson at that time, near the border with Mexico. There, under an astonishingly vast sky, you encounter a mix of cultures: remnants of societies that flourished for millenia before being fought by European colonialists; industries focused on space tourism; and private militias hunting illegalized migrants. All of this likely shaped my perspective.
Looking at the contents of the "Golden Records" NASA sent into space, I was captivated by blend of scientific rigor, cutting-edge engineering, and the overtly political or ideological undertones woven into it. Then there’s the slightly goofy notion of communicating with aliens—using Bach, Gamelan music, the voice of former SA member Kurt Waldheim, whale songs, and images ranging from an embryo in the second of being born to diagrams of our place in the universe, so alien recipients might locate us.
This mind-boggling collage takes you into so many avenues for thought: You can see its Cold War ideologies, particularly in the "global north"; how our longing for "aliens" out there speaks to our fear of truly being alone in a vast, indifferent universe; or the chutzpah these seven US-Americans had back then: taking it upon themselves to decide how to represent "life on earth" for the next 500 million years on behalf of humanity.
What questions or issues are you exploring artistically through this project?
As an artist working in research-based projects that often involve diverse participants and communities, I started thinking: What if we produced new Golden Records, but this time based upon input from as many people as possible? What if we directed the message to aliens back at ourselves?
Taking NASA’s metaphorical message—a stroke of marketing genius— into our own hands, we can democratize the decisions of what to include, giving representation to many communities and stakeholders. In short: Creating an image of life on earth in an ever-evolving endeavor, which is potentially endless. To be honest, I have a strong affiliation with "Projektemacherei" from baroque times—with their impossible projects, diligent hard work going into it, sometimes producing practical outcomes, while searching for means to turn sand into gold.
Instead of producing yet another fixed "selfie" of humanity that may soon feel outdated, we invite audiences into artistic spaces, dynamic and evolving RECORDING STUDIOS. Which are less about creating a fixed product, instead hosting live assemblies that foster discourse around questions like "How do we want to be remembered?" and "Who gets to decide?"
How does your project address the concept of "the end"? Is it focused on the end of humanity, the end of memories, or the end of certain knowledge systems? And how can art serve as a tool to reflect on such endings?
I think the GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS play with different notions of "the end". On the first level it foregrounds the scandal that all of us will be dead in a few years and that maybe our species will not be around anymore when the first recipients of our message start deciphering it. That’s a bummer and a creative shock when people start thinking about their own messages to someone out there. On another level, it liberates participants to think about what is truly worth saving or communicating. You quickly realize and feel, how our own apparently natural decisions are based on our very specific moment in time and the cultures we are part of.
For example, the original records represented "civilization" with images of large structures like the Taj Mahal, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the UN headquarters in New York City. Here, as in other samples they chose, you can easily detect inherent hierarchies and Western-centric racism—looking at which bodies are represented how on their records; or how social situations are being shown and in which "ethnic" settings. On top of this, you also realize how our common Western notion that built long-lasting structures speak of the amazing knowledge and capabilities of "high" cultures, leaving out all kinds of cultures that had very developed knowledge systems, complex political and societal structures—but which maybe did not find it necessary to invest in large representations of power.
So „the end“ plays a highly productive and inspiring role in the GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS, and I would add that they are also about finding out, which ruins of our present we want to leave for coming intelligences – be they human or machine-based.
Scientists often discuss the Anthropocene and its implications for the future of humanity. Does your project address questions related to the Anthropocene or the potential for human culture to persist after a possible end?
I might evoke "Chthulucene" here, drawing on Donna Haraway’s lineage back to Lynn Margulis, who happened to marry Carl Sagan as a young woman. And while he was a "charismatic scientific educator", who "essentially made cool and sexy ideas developed in the Renaissance", as their son, Dorion, would put it—it was his mother, Lynn, whose research into the concept of the holobiont was really novel and has far-reaching repercussions up to our present: How we perceive ourselves beyond the traditional notion of Ego with all its destructive consequences. While Dorion’s father was looking to the stars—and reaching millions of people in front of their TVs—, it was his mother who got her hands dirty in the mud, finding connections far beyond what had been conceptualized before. This is a perspective I’d also like to take with the GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS.
How do you realize the concept of GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS artistically? What media or performative approaches do you use?
The GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS can take place pretty much anywhere and take on any form in dialogue with the location and our collaborators there: So far, it has been staged in a lab where pico-satellites are built, Europe’s largest animal shelter, a neo-hippie communal loft, a Swiss mountain overlooking Davos, or on a Saturday night at a university in Pakistan…
Besides many other places. At it’s core, the project centers on assemblies where participants collectively grapple with questions about representation, semiotics, expertise, and narratives of all sorts—while forming a political body of their own. These gatherings are ephemeral, playful moments of community engagement, enriched by performative, visual, and musical elements.
How does the participatory process of creating these new records engage with humanity's legacy in the face of collapse?
Looking at and listening to all the samples and questions that participants contribute, and the joy they have in doing so, I feel that, despite anxieties about the future, and how we deal with challenges in the present—participants display such an incredible capacity to create, to come up with new variations, to re-combine realities, to find different aspects to common questions, suggesting that even if our societies collapse, we may leave behind a fascinating archive for future archaeologists—or intelligences—to discover.
How is the project connecting with communities beyond Central Europe, and what are your next steps?
Right now, we are planning to take the GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS to partners in North Africa, the Middle East and to other places in Europe. I am very curious to see how diverse communities respond to the project’s questions. Ultimately, I hope to launch a DIY version—an adaptable framework that can collect inputs from around the world, allowing people to create their own versions of the record. I’d love to see that taking off from our platform.
ABOUT LUKAS MATTHAEI
Lukas Matthaei has realized over 50 performative projects with collaborators & actors in Europe, Middle East, North Africa, India, USA since 2000. He works in diverse formats, based on longer research phases in specific communities & diverse realities. The focus is on participatory productions for urban landscapes, alongside works for the stage, installations & radio.
