Michelle Hartney

LOVE IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE

In 1977, NASA launched Voyagers I and II, carrying a Golden Record containing a collection of images and sounds to represent life on Earth. The project was lead by Dr Carl Sagan and creative director Ann Druyan, who fell madly in love during the curation of the record.  This body of work was inspired by a recording of Druyan's heartbeat and brain waves, created during the early days of falling in love.

…I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in one’s brain and nervous system into sound, and then put that sound on the record, and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought. And he looked at me in - a beautiful May day in New York City, and said well, you know, why don’t you go do it and - because who knows…what’s possible in a thousand-million years?

This series is a visual representation of what I believe those brain waves, saturated with love, may look like, traveling at 35,000 miles an hour, as they leave our solar system for the “great, wide-open sea of interstellar space.”

* On September 12, 2013, NASA officially confirmed that Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space.