Talk: Space Hauntings. Golden Records, Hope and Regrets in a Tender Time

ABOUT THE TALK

Bo Reimer will discuss the uncanniness of the "Golden Records" and place them in a hauntological perspective. He will also discuss how the Tender Time project works on the production of haunted future memories; memories that do not shy away from time’s out of jointness.

For more than 40 years Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have travelled through space transmitting data to Earth. Included aboard each of the Voyager spacecraft is a “Golden Record” containing sounds and images telling stories of life and culture on Earth, among them spoken greetings in 55 different languages, both ancient and modern, and 27 music pieces from different parts of the world. Now having left Earth’s solar system, the only spacecrafts to have done so, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts continue their intergalactic journey with increasingly infrequent contact to Earth. 

Existing at extreme distance from our planet, the Voyagers’ Golden Records have emerged as uncanny artifacts, existing as echoes from the past that remain alive, moving continuously through space, and through time. These are the only extraterrestrial archives of human cultures. The Golden Records may survive for more than three billion years; they will be there long after our planet has been absorbed by the sun.

In the Tender Time installation, produced by the Medea Lab, Malmö University, and exhibited at the Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice from May to November 2023, into the Voyagers’ existing cultural archive new sonic layers were curated, performed and woven, adding to the spectral sensibility of the work. The sounds and images etched into the grooves of the Golden Records were (re)presented in an immersive environment, with sonic, visual and textual elements conjuring the disjunctures of space and time that the Voyager mission makes apparent. By recognizing the instability and interconnectedness of past, present and future, Tender Time aimed to perform a hauntological aesthetic. 

The team behind the Golden Record decided to exclude sounds and images of destruction, war, and distress: the Golden Record was to convey hope. This choice meant, however, that this archive of humankind is haunted by its own clinical purity and a superficial picture of geopolitical harmony. With the Tender Time installation, an attempt was made to challenge this harmony and explore the sense of vulnerability that haunt our current moment of continuous planetary crisis. We therefore recorded, mixed and ‘sent into outer space’ voices that spoke of regret: of plans that did not work out and futures that never got to be, but which still haunt.

ABOUT THE EVENT

The discussants will be:

- Paddy Edgley, a material and visual anthropologist interested in outer space, cosmology, and how people imagine their futures both on and off Earth.
- James Kneale, Senior Lecturer in UCL Geography, whose research encompasses literary geographies and representations of space, particularly in non-realist genres (science fiction, horror, ghost stories, utopias etc). He has co-edited a collection on geographies of science fiction with Rob Kitchin.

The event will be chaired by Claire Thomson (Professor of Cinema History and Director of UCL SELCS-CMII).

The event is organised by the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society, the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, and the Institute of Advanced Studies.