Speaking in Tongues |

Yesterday's post looked at the interpretation of a fashion armour for a futuristic battle. Let's remain in space for another day with a brief post that looks at the video installation "Once Upon a Time" (2002) by Steve McQueen at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale.

The video features the digitised version of the 116 images from the Golden Records compiled by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and launched into space in 1977 on both the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2. The Golden Record, including images of life on Earth, accompanied by recordings of human greetings, world music, surf, wind, thunder, and animals, was supposed to act a bit like the proverbial message in a bottle and was intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life or for future humans who may find it.

McQueen overimposed on the images linguist William J. Samarin's recordings of Pentecostal glossolalia, indecipherable sounds of an invented language, to hint at the hypothetical intelligibility of the pictures, and create a discrepancy between the images compiled by NASA (that had to tell a story of human evolution and knowledge) and a series of meaningless utterances.