or: how we will be remembered, long after the world has forgotten how to say our names.
it’s nearly impossible to consider the future and not have questions. let me say it another way: there are always questions, but with the future, there’s nothing to jumpstart the answers to those questions off of. there are no contexts, no bases of reference. without that, how are we to know? without information and experimentation, what is certain? will it rain, tomorrow? if not, what will happen? and what will i think, then? what will i learn, there? i have found that instead of facts, concepts seem to better fit this loose framing of what the future could be: all placement, purpose, and presence.
this comes into view especially when we begin to think about the far off future. the far, far off future, multiple millennia away. this is the future for which trevor paglen makes his piece, the last pictures, for. in the piece, paglen combines art and engineering, mentioning his realization that spacecrafts are some of the longest-lasting things humans have ever made, calling them artifacts in this context. they’re a perfect medium for creating art that will last until that far, far off future comes into being, but it brings up an interesting question: what will this piece, this art, mean to the beings of the future? what will this piece of art stand to say, in that future? to the ever-unknowable audience?
art is communication. we know this, feel this, how we are always asking: what does this mean to me? what does this mean to you? we speak of meaning, of references, contexts, but this entire paradigm shatters when we begin making art for a future that is unknowable. one that has no references for any art made with current contexts in mind. one that is entirely alien, entirely new. suddenly, there, art doesn’t mean anything. meaning itself loses its meaning. any kind of story, or sense, becomes abstract, color and shape and nothing at all. it becomes everything, an excess of everything and nothing at all. but it’s still art, isn’t it?
art is reflection. i really love how paglen says this, in the article, how the piece will come across as “a story that was not about who the people were who built the dead satellites in perpetual orbit so much as a story about what they did to themselves.” like this, we build stories out of our satellites. we build mirrors. we build time capsules and launch them on a seemingly endless voyage, and sometimes, we look up and watch them fly by. we watch what time does to them, how it makes them into artifacts, into ghost ships, sailing forever on the edge of the world. we watch them watch us, as the same thing happens to ourselves.
there is something here that paglen doesn’t talk about in the interview. something i get caught on, when the concept of the future comes up: change. humans are always changing, and even though some forms of art – including satellites – mostly remain constant, humans change, and their contexts and frames of view change with them. it’s cause and effect: humans change, and so, art changes with us. humans grow, the world adapts. meaning collapses, but art doesn’t, time doesn’t. this distance – it isn’t the breaking point.
i want to mention that this change, it doesn’t have to be dramatic, or drastic. it can come back around and parallel, it can go a little ouroboros, it can even rhyme. in the article, paglen references cave paintings as an inspiration for the last pictures, and how we are still, even today, trying to solve the question of what some of them mean. the one he specifically mentions, “the shaft” or “the pit” from lascaux, isn’t anything necessarily special, it’s nothing grandiose. it’s sketching on a cave wall, and yet, even today, we talk about it. we try to solve it. it’s a mystery, and even though we don’t know the true original meaning of its creation, it still means something. it’s still art, to us, even after all this time. even outside of its original context, its true meaning, in our entirely new world, it still holds meaning.
and isn’t that everything? humanity’s universality? how years and years and millennia apart, we’re communicating. we’re trying to figure it out, and even if we aren’t able to – we’re still talking about it, we’re still trying. we’re still being inspired by it, for our own creations, in paglen’s case, and even for our own futures. we saw something interesting, something old and connecting and human, something we didn’t have context for, and in the face of that missing space, we made our own. we filled in the blanks ourselves. there will always be meaning as long as there is a want for it, as long as there are those that go looking for it.
time tells us what we are, if we let it. we usually use it as a source for disconnection, most of the time. you are not what you were / or what you will become / you are you, now, a momentary forever. but if we pull back the frame, if we reposition to see the whole picture: we are always looking for meaning. we always have been, haven't we? always looking for the heart of things, the hands outstretched through time. we are small and we are human and that should be enough. i want that to be enough. don't you?
haven’t you noticed we’ve made it this far? we are that unknowable audience. we've been through it all before, past / present / future, it all comes back around. in a way, even now, even here, in this present moment, we are satellites ourselves. we are orbiting our own planets, our own stars. we’re coming into view, as the world spins. they’re watching us, all of our own unknowable audiences. we’re streaking across their skies, and everyone can see us burning in all of our light. we’re as bright as any star, but we’re different: we’re closer, just out of reach. we’re moving, we’re changing, night after night after night, and all the while, we’re trying to leave something behind; echoes, impressions, pieces of ourselves. we’re speaking, hoping, desperately trying to say: wherever you are, whenever you are, whatever it looks like there, i hope that the stars are still shining for you. i hope that you’re still looking up. i hope that even if you can't hear us, that you're giving us your stories. that you're still connecting our dots, even if all you're doing is drawing lines in the dark.
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