Golden Record Studios: Mannheim

In the organizer's words:

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Co-production by matthaei&konsorten, the Mannheimer Stadtensemble and Kollaborateur*innen, in cooperation with bermuda.funk
In German language

1977: NASA launches its "Golden Records" into space on board Voyager 1 and 2. A message to aliens with embellished images, music and messages from Earth. 2024: Mannheim produces its own record! What should be on it? What are the Golden Records? The "Golden Records" are data disks that were sent into space by NASA in 1977 with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. Their aim: to send a message from humanity to possible extraterrestrial civilizations. With a shelf life of around 500 million years, they are intended to transmit information about our existence long after humanity has ceased to exist. Symbolic instructions on the protective cover of the plate explain how the data can be decoded. The position of the Earth is indicated by the relative distances to 14 pulsars - a constellation that acts as a cosmic reference to our existence. In addition, the shell contains tiny amounts of uranium-238, the decay of which makes it possible to determine the age of the record. What's on it? The grooves of the Golden Records from 1977 contain a strange mixture of evidence of the earth: music from European baroque to Azerbaijani bagpipes, from initiation songs in Central Africa to blues and rock'n'roll, pictures of female researchers with chimpanzees, Javanese temple dancers and Dutch cyclists in front of telescope dishes. The content was decided by just seven US-Americans - their preferences and perspective thus shape the message of "life on earth": half of the music comes from the USA and Europe, the highlights of civilizational achievements are in the "West", and remarkably, no depictions of disease, death or war were included on the records, just as non-human life is hardly depicted. Golden Record Studios The Golden Record Studios are an internationally traveling project by the artist group "matthaei&konsorten" for the collaborative re-recording of a world selfie: Whose stories and memories, images and sounds should find a place on our record? Who decides on the selection? Do we want to send them to aliens in a distant galaxy? Will the descendants of our machines read them? How do we want to be remembered? And how do our ideas of a possible future change our actions in the present? The new version differs from the old records in that material is collected in a wide variety of places, with the participation of diverse communities and in a collective selection process - like an assembly on stage. The "Golden Record Studios" aim to create a new, contemporary world selfie, with voices and perspectives that are as diverse as the world we live in. The studios have already made stops in Berlin, Vienna, Münster, Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and at the World Ethics Forum in Switzerland. Others are planned for Morocco, Tanzania and Augsburg. The results of the respective studios will be continuously documented on the project's interactive website. GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS: MANNHEIM Together with the Mannheim City Ensemble, the Golden Record Studio invites the public to make their own recordings: What should go on the Mannheim Golden Record? What is worth sending here and now into the distant future? Do we even want that? Or would some things rather remain forgotten? The audience is invited to actively participate in the creation of a new Golden Record together with experts and artists from the Rhine-Neckar region. Input from astronomers, apocalypse researchers and archivists will open up perspectives and inspire new images. At interactive stations, visitors can contribute their own samples to the big selfie, while the Bermuda radio broadcasts the live reportage of the gathering to the region and into space. At the end of each studio session, the finished Golden Record will be handed over to the Mannheim city archive MARCHIVUM - as a testimony to the city for centuries to come. The artist Lukas Matthaei works under the label "matthaei&konsorten" in a variety of artistic formats that are based on longer research phases and take place in specific communities. This content has been machine translated.