A collaboration with Saskia Wilson-Brown, this two-part piece was commissioned as part of NASA/JPL’s Blended Worlds exhibit, shown at Glendale’s Brand Library as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide

We are set many years in the future, with humans living away from planet Earth. This exhibit consists of two main themes: 

Sensory Mementos looks back toward Earth, letting visitors experience Earth’s wonders through scents, each providing a memory of our home planet and the trail into the galactic unknown. These scentscapes prompt us to imagine a time when only olfactory molecules remain, raising questions about loss, memory, and meaning. 

Interstellar Soundings invites visitors to imagine worlds that are even farther away, using sound to convey the vast distances of exoplanets throughout our galaxy. An algorithm scans a database of exoplanets, playing sounds for each planet, delayed according to their distance from Earth. This composition lets us feel interstellar distances, with longer delays suggesting how far we must search for a new home.

This exhibit approaches the topics of time, distance, memory, and our place in the universe by exploring immense distances and generational timescales. The installation presents a sensorial and material record of longing and hope that transcends time-frames, and posits that what makes us human will, somehow, endure.

The exhibit is presented in two adjacent rooms. In the Interstellar Soundings room we use sound to feel the vast distances of our cosmos. Here a composition is paced by space time: an algorithm scans a database of all known exoplanets and cycles through groups of 16. A sound plays for each planet in the group, delayed proportionally to the distance of that new world from Earth. The score allows us to feel interstellar distance through music, with the long delays of the furthest planets suggesting how far we may have to seek to find harbor beyond our home planet.

In this way we experience vastness through musical timing, and feel the magnitude of distance with the pacing and emotion of the generative composition.

The Sensory Mementos room contains a series of scents from our life on Earth and other places we have sought to live, using scent to evoke memory. An array of scented vessels sit on a series of shelves; the objects are gone, but the sense memory of the experiences have been re-created through the chemical composition of the scent by our departed future selves. The piece imagines a future in which humans seek to reestablish a connection by recreating what is now, for them, only a generational memory. Their experiment recreates lost olfactory landscapes, preserved through narratives and molecular signatures, to  evoke memories of their life on Earth and journey outward into the stars. These reconstructed scentscapes prompt us to reflect on loss, meaning, and the unreliability of memory.

Press

Credits

In collaboration with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – an operating division of Caltech and a Federally Funded Research and Development Center for NASA – and the City of Glendale’s Library, Arts & Culture Department

Curators

David Delgado & Dan Goods

Lead Investigators 

Artists: Shane Myrbeck & Saskia Wilson-Brown

Collaborators 

Astrophysicist: Anjali Tripathi, JPL

Fabricators 

Mount Maker: Kamil Beski, Beski Projects

Fabricators: McNICHOLS, Los Angeles Glassblowing

External Collaborators

Emily Shisko, Micah Hahn

Special Thanks: Carrie Paterson

With special thanks to Richie Kulchar and Ben Boyd from Junk Films.