Tweets... In... Space....

from the an-art-project dept

I was just recently listening to Radiolab's excellent episode about "Space", which contains a really great talk with Ann Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan, about how they worked together to produce a "record" that was shot into space with the original Voyager expedition (and about how they fell in love while doing so). One of the things that's striking about that is how much thought went into figuring out what exactly to "send into space" and how much effort it took to then launch that message. But, these days, it's getting easier and easier to communicate and easier and easier to send stuff into space. So a pair of artists, Nathaniel Stern* and Scott Kildall, are doing something of an art project to see if they can launch a bunch of tweets into space:

Tweets in Space beams Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 20 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life. Simply add #tweetsinspace to your texts between 8:30 and 9PM Mountain Time on September 21st 2012, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico (ISEA2012). We will collect your tweets and transmit them into deep space via a high-powered radio messaging system. Our soon-to-be alien friends might receive unmediated thoughts and responses about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between. By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them into the larger Universe, Tweets in Space activates a potent conversation about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding.

Perhaps it's not nearly as impressive as the record on the Voyager, but in some ways that's the point. One of the amazing things about the communications revolution we're living through today is how anyone can communicate just about anything, no matter how banal. Of course, mixed in with all of that are also some amazing insights and stories. And they don't need gatekeepers choosing who passes them along. Even if the likelihood of this project actually getting any tweets read by alien life forms is close to nil, conceptually, it's a fun idea that highlights how quickly the world of communications is changing.

* Disclosure: Stern and I went to college together and I consider him a friend, even if I haven't seen him in something like fourteen years.

Filed Under: art, expression, tweets in space