The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Record We Threw to the Stars — Cape Canaveral, 1977

A clean room at Cape Canaveral, the Voyager spacecraft on its stand, its golden record being bolted to the outer bulkhead

August 20, 1977 — a machine built to leave the solar system and never come back, with a phonograph record of gold-plated copper mounted on its side, carrying music and greetings and the sounds of one planet out into the dark, the launch hours away

You are bolting a mixtape to a machine that will never come home. This breach reads the TECHNICIAN ON THE FLOOR at Cape Canaveral: the Voyager spacecraft on its stand, the golden record and its aluminum cover being fixed to the bulkhead by hand, torque wrench and gloves, hours before it is thrown past the planets forever. The witness is read only at the workbench and the fastening — the immensity of where it is going held softly behind the plain work of the hands. The fragment is the subject's own: the thing they made or fixed or fastened knowing it would outlast them, the labor put into something that would leave and not return — and the memory beneath it of a time they gave careful hands to something meant to go on without them, a made thing sent off into a distance they would never follow.

From the record

the Voyager spacecraft each carried a phonograph record of gold-plated copper, mounted on the outside of the craft
the record held music, spoken greetings in many languages, natural sounds of Earth, and encoded images
an aluminum cover was fixed over the record, etched with symbols showing how to play it and where the craft came from
Voyager 2 launched from Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1977, with Voyager 1 following weeks later
the spacecraft were built to leave the solar system and continue outward, expected to outlast the Earth itself

The era door

a heavy sealed door with a rubber gasket and a small window, the paint institutional white, a chrome lever handle cold from the conditioned air

CAPE CANAVERAL — AUGUST 20, 1977

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037