hostblog

Don’t you just love the way that research has the habit of finding connections whichever multiple directions your thinking takes you? here is one of many tenuous links between some of the avenues I’m meandering along in research for this residency.

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, astrobiologist and successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Sagan was involved in many of the unmanned solar system exploration missions, especially in the placing of experiments on robotic expeditions. He was responsible for the plaque attached to Pioneer 10 and 11 and after continuous refinement of his ideas was involved in the development and assembly of the golden record sent with the Voyager craft 5 years later.

In 1957 sagan married Lynn Margulis.

Margulis is a biologist best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and the development of the theory of endosymbiosis. Originally dismissed and after years of insistance by Margulis endosymbiosis is now generally accepted as how certain organelles were formed. The underlying theme of endosymbiotic theory, as formulated in 1966, was interdependence and cooperative existence of multiple prokaryotic organisms; one organism engulfed another, yet both survived and eventually evolved over millions of years into eukaryotic cells.

Sagan and Margulis has two sons, Jeremy and Dorian.

Dorion Sagan is a popular science writer and has written and co-authored many books on evolution, many co-authored with his mother, most recently Into the Cool, co-authored with Eric D. Schneider, on the subject of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Jeremy Sagan founded Sagan Technology, a company focusing on the creation of multimedia software for Apple Macintosh computers such as Metro, Metro LX and Metro SE.

Space exploration, extra-terrestrial communications, exobiology, microbiology, evolutionary theory, multimedia and mac computers all in one family. My betting is that they had a secret daughter who painted highly romanticised landscapes of the northern Pennines…

Pioneer:
Pioneer 10 was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 36A on March 2, 1972. It was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter and the first artificial object to leave the solar system. Pioneer 11 was the second mission to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system and the first to explore the planet Saturn and its main rings and was launched from Cape Canaveral on April 6, 1973.

Both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft carried aluminium placques featuring a pictorial message from humanity in case either the Pioneer 10 or 11 are intercepted by ‘extraterrestrial beings’. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female (determined from results of a computerized analysis of the average person in our civilization) along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The key to translating the plaque lies in understanding the breakdown of the most common element in the universe - hydrogen. The idea being that they serve as a kind of interstellar “message in a bottle” and initiate meaningful exchange with other universal inhbaitants - but the mean time for the spacecraft to come within 30 astronomical units of a star is longer than the current age of our galaxy. However, NASA expects the plaques (and the crafts themselves) to survive longer than the Earth and Sun.

Voyager:
Launched in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. The spacecraft will take about 40,000 years to come near another star - meaning within around 1.7 light-years’ distance.

Aboard the Voyager craft is the ‘Golden Record’ a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections form different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messaged from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

Arecibo:
The Arecibo message is a radio message consisting of 1679 binary digits that was beamed into space at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974 and aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away due to its availability in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony. The number 1679 was chosen because it is a semiprime (the product of two prime numbers) and therefore can only be broken down into 23 rows and 73 columns, or 73 rows and 23 columns. This assumes that those who read it will choose to arrange it as a rectangle. The information arranged the first way (23 rows, 73 columns) produces jumbled nonsense, but if arranged the second way (73 rows, 23 columns) it forms the image which is assumed to be recognizable as data (obviously to our subjective view).

Because it will take 25,000 years for the message to reach its intended destination of stars (and an additional 25,000 for any reply), the Arecibo message was more a demonstration of human technological achievement than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials.

Reading the image from top to bottom and left to right, it can be divided into 7 parts that show the following:

1. the numbers one to ten;
2. the atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up DNA;
3. the formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA;
4. the number of nucleotides in DNA, and a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA;
5. a graphic figure of a man, the dimensions of an average man, and the human population of Earth;
6. a graphic of Earth’s solar system;
7. a graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimension of the transmitting antenna dish.

the voyager ‘golden record’ - 1977

pioneer placque - 1972 / 73

arecibo dish transmission - 1974

the original brief for the residency - the first ever DRU residency with a theme - was ‘the pennine landscape (around marsden) and network technology. get that. how do i work my interests of microbiology, general living things, future life forms, extremophiles, machinic ecologies, emergence and artificial intelligence into that? well, fairly easily it seem - and more.

in many ways the residency exists / was proposed as a kind of technical research opportunity - and one that it would be foolish to pass up - but i can’t help but get excited about all sorts of conceptual, contextual and theoretical developments that seem to be pointing towards a whole new piece of work. a new piece of a.r.t.

the research themes so far:
1) the plaques aboard the pioneer and voyager spacecraft (see ‘the messages‘ and ‘the big 3‘)
2) other extraplanetary messaging strategies such as the arecibo dish transmissions
3) the english romantic landscape tradition (especially of the victorian era)
4) the etching possibilities of bacteria involved in the sulphur cycle
5) allowing these microbes to draw the post-industrial landscape they came from
6) the collecting of data produced by the microbes as they perform these tasks
7) the transmission of data produced by the microbes that reflects their activities and life-states (umwelts) as they perform these tasks

the thinking that has led me towards these disparate elements is too complex and convoluted to remember and turn into words, however, like most things i do it feeds heavily on past work while trying to make new stuff happen. most importantly for me at the moment is to be able to get meaningful data from microbial communities and to do something interesting with it. putting this simple goal into the context of the residency brief pushed me towards all the other stuff.

there is a certain amount of debate and criticism about the 70s messages on board the pioneer and voyager craft, mostly based around ambiguities and possible undecipherable elements in the design - but no one really seems to discuss the content (apart from puritanical uproar about exposed genitalia). bacteria are the most prolific life form on this planet and are ‘more than likely’ the most prolific on others, therefore the most probable to be encountered first. shouldn’t our microbes be allowed some say in what is communicated into space? and why couldn’t that be some kind of emotional, personal (if you’ll excuse the anthropocentric terminology) response the landscape they have come from? seeing as the reason we are looking into space migration is because we might just have spoilt this place shouldn’t the microbes be from post industrial polluted sites anyway?

the view of the victorian landscape painting tradition was a little rose tinted to say the very least. at the time that the foundations for the planet changing industrial revolution were being well and truly consolidated the images they made were of a pastoral paradise. i’d like to see how the microbes of old pennine industrial sites might envisage their awe inspiring environment.

hostblog is a journal of research carried out by Andy Gracie (hostprods) whilst artist in residence at DRU, Huddersfield from May to July 2007. The blog serves both as an archive of practical experiments and as an anthology of thought and theory developed alongside.

hostblog exists to document the development, ideas, inspirations, research, revelations, criticisms, compliments, successes and failures related to the hostprods residency at DRU, huddersfield. the blog starts from now - just about one month before the residency begins.

the residency will take place at the DRU, bates mill, huddersfield and will be carried out by andy gracie with a lot of help from dr paul humphreys and anyone’s brain that is there for the picking.