Relic
2019
“Relic" is a form derived from recordings made onboard the Voyager spacecraft in its exploration of our solar system. The work uses sound to generate form using a experimental digital process.
The form was inspired by Dr. Carl Sagan reflections on Voyager’s last photograph of earth, “Pale Blue Dot” where he contemplates our place in the “immeasurable vastness of space”. This inspired my thought of Voyager as the last relic of humanity. “Relic” represents that idea, it is a lament on our modern condition, a species destined to become the agents of our own extinction.
The form is realised in recycled plastics, printed in 3D with a large robotic printer and finished in bioluminescent paint. A white pearlescent quality by day, it transforms by night to glow in the dark beckoning humans to come closer. As you draw closer it emits a subtle low frequency audio, which affects humans in a deeply emotional manner. Its highly polished reflective surfaces create the desire to touch, something I would encourage if possible. The UV paints are also heat sensitive and so will alter with the human interaction.
2018 *Accepted for Sculpture by the Sea 2019
Excerpt from the “Pale Blue Dot” Dr Carl Sagan.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one
