In their remixes, they take unprecedented liberties with the sounds of Earth, bounding beyond even the most elementary of legal restrictions - enumerated in such cautions as the below, which appeared on a 1992 commercially available CD-ROM of the Voyager Interstellar Record: “it is apparent that the aliens are playing fast and loose with complex intercultural questions and flirting with copyright violation on an interstellar scale. The notes also discuss whether the alleged alien remixers behind the document have fallen afoul of copyright law: The liner notes for Scrambles reflect explicitly on the question of who “owns” the sounds on the Voyager Golden Record.
For one interpretation of the visual rhetoric of the instructions on the Record, see Helmreich ( Helmreich 2011). In 2002, artist Steve McQueen debuted Once Upon a Time, a slideshow-installation that showed one Voyager image after another in slow, dissolving succession, to the accompaniment of recordings of glossolaliac voices (see Downey 2006). The Record also encoded 116 images and photographs. The eventual CD cover for Scrambles also made visual reference to the original Murmurs package (Figures 3 and 4). Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman’s 1978 documentary book, Murmurs of Earth, about the making of the Voyager Record, and one that might also serve to make the project legible to those people familiar with Seeland’s tradition of sonic heterodoxy.
#QUERY GOLDEN RECORDS ARCHIVE#
SETI-X’s audio archive was eventually released on a CD entitled Scrambles of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Remixed by Extraterrestrials, a somewhat more sensationalist title than SETI-X might have liked, but one that Seeland hoped could make explicit a link back to Carl Sagan, F.D. While SETI-X may initially have been leery of having their research findings distributed by a record label known for publishing “copyright violation art,” in the end the organization seems to have decided that this was the only viable path toward making their findings public. With no response from Sealand, SETI-X, through a serendipitous Google typo, ended up discovering an ally in Seeland Records, an independent record label known for releasing audio recordings of uncertain provenance and ambiguous legal status.
Remixing the Voyager Interstellar Record: Or, As Extraterrestrials Might Listen. Whether such Voyager Record echoes are messages meant for Earthly receipt or are simply exploratory experiments in sound that happen to have been intercepted on their way to somewhere else remains to be determined. It may be that aliens have started listening in - and more, as the Scrambles of Earth document suggests, it may be that aliens have started to create their own interpretations of the Earth sounds they have received.
The Voyager Record, a compendium of recorded Earth sounds affixed in phonograph form to NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, was launched out of Earth orbit in the 1970s and in 2013 left our solar system to travel into interstellar space. This text offers an introduction to a hyperlink,, a portal to the Scrambles of Earth project, which is dedicated to decoding and disseminating audio transmissions of possible extraterrestrial origin that have been received on Earth in response to the Voyager Golden Record.
0 kommentar(er)
