In September 2012, a gold-plated shell encasing a small silicon disc, was affixed to the exterior of EchoStar XVI, a communications satellite, and then launched over twenty-two thousand miles into outer space. Designed by artist Trevor Paglen, the silicon disc is etched with 100 images that offer a visual mediation on space, time, the limits of knowledge and communication, and the representation of human civilizations. Working with leading philosophers, scientists, artists, and historians to develop this collection of images, Paglen offers a unique time capsule that he describes as a “meditation on the troubled intersections of human time and cosmological time.”
The Last Pictures will remain the Earth’s geosynchronous orbit as one of civilization’s longest-lasting relics.
In this Talk, Trevor Paglen reflects on The Last Pictures and his artistic practice that deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us.
Co-presented with Creative Time.
Admission: €5 / €3 with discount
About Prompts & Triggers
While talk is thick these days about crisis, be it economical, ecological, cultural, or even spiritual, a larger question looms: how and where to situate value, especially in a context as diverse as the European continent? Already riddled with moving-target projections and contradictory positions—such as the game of keeping a rising China or a potent Turkey at bay, while attempting to capitalize on them at the same time, or the conscious and subconscious anxieties produced when personal religiosity is expected to be surrendered in favor of a secular public body— it would seem that different and differing interests are not easily encompassed in neat packages. Prompts & Triggers is a series of propositions by artists who call attention to certain conditions, which spur social anxieties—and in so doing, ponder if such defense mechanisms actually betray underlying divides which must be first unpacked and examined.