Friday, October 5, 2012

"Last pictures:" 100 photos to be placed in a stable, billion-year orbit for future archeologists, human or otherwise, to ponder

This fall, Creative Time will launch The Last Pictures, an archival disc created by artist Trevor Paglen, into outer space, where it will orbit the earth for billions of years affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI.  To create the artifact, Paglen micro-etched one hundred photographs selected to represent modern human history onto a silicon disc encased in a gold-plated shell, designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carleton College.

the capsule:

Disc_001

Project info:
http://creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/

The photos:
http://creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/the-pictures/

3 comments:

  1. I wonder who paid for this shit?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I hope they used your taxes exclusively on this "shit"!
    I would rather pay for this than for videos of our military
    taking out buildings and people.

    Seriously, it is cretins like you who drag down the collective human race.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "I wonder who paid for this shit?"

    You only had to click the link to find out.

    Most of the funding was private: "The Last Pictures is made possible through the visionary support of Lawrence B. Benenson, Sheila
    Duignan and Mike Wilkins, EchoStar Corporation, Epner Technology, Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts."

    As for the NEA portion, in anticipation of the protests from those who cannot see the value in Art qua Art, the NEA says: "A dollar invested directly through the NEA is matched by $8 of additional [private] investment and generates $26 of economic activity in the community." (http://www.arts.gov/news/news12/Budget.html)

    Also worth noting: The NEA budget is 0.00005 of the US Federal Budget.

    And for further perspective: The Romney campaign has already spent over twice as much money on political ads as the NEA gets for its entire annual budget.( http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance/independent-expenditures/totals )

    Just sayin'.


    ReplyDelete