Picnic Seminar - Seattle Design Festival 2023

The Golden Record: What Are We to Make of This?

The seminar revolves around the idea of the Golden Record, a phonograph record sent into space by NASA via Voyager 1 and 2 with the intention of communicating the intricacies of life on Earth through sound. We use this concept to explore themes of perception, empathy, and interconnectedness, and the ways in which our understanding of each other and lapses in the same form the fabric of who we are as a community.

Differences in perception are the heart of what makes the creative pursuit special and powerful. Through these slight deviations, we find each other's synchronicities and open our minds through the magic nestled in each other's respective viewpoints. Day to day life is individualistic, but life on earth is richly collaborative. Design exists as a result of this coinciding duality - it is an endeavor to not only bridge gaps through unique perspectives, but to make these gaps sparkle.

As part of the seminar we created a participatory experimental sound project as a vehicle for discussion, ultimately forming this short "exquisite corpse" style piece of music. During the listening activity, participants individually draw graphic scores which they will then compare with each other.

Questions for discussion:

1. In what ways does your graphic score represent who you are? 2. Look at the works of your neighbors. What similarities can you find? What do you see of your own view in the perception of others? 3. If all of your graphic scores were a series of paintings, what would you name the collection? What are the common threads in these names?

Prefaced by “But What Is the Reader To Make of This?” by John Asbery

A lake of pain, an absence

Leading to a flowering sea? Give it a quarter-turn

And watch the centuries begin to collapse

Through each other, like floors in a burning building,

Until we get to this afternoon:

Those delicious few words spread around like jam

Don’t matter, nor does the shadow.

We have lived blasphemously in history

And nothing has hurt us or can.

But beware of the monstrous tenderness, for out of it

The same blunt archives loom. Facts seize hold of the web

And leave it ash. Still, it is the personal,

Interior life that fives us something to think about.

The rest is only drama.

Meanwhile the combinations of every extendable circumstance

In our lives continue to blow against it like new leaves

At the edge of a forest battle rages in and out of

For a whole day. It’s not the background, we’re the

            background,

On the outside looking out. The surprises history has

For us are nothing compared to the shock we get

From each other, though time still wears

The colors of meanness and melancholy, and the general life

Is still many sizes too big, yet

Has style, woven of things that never happened

With those that did, so that a mood survives

Where life and death never could. Make it sweet again!