How can matter carry memory across deep time and remain legible to an unknown reader?
DESIGNING MATERIAL ARCHIVES FOR UNKNOWN FUTURES
In brief: Endurance alone does not create memory. For matter to carry meaning across deep time, the object must also preserve the conditions of its own interpretation: where it came from, when it was made and how it can be activated and decoded. Drawing on precedents such as the Voyager Golden Record and the Rosetta Disk, the research applies this question to ceramic, stone, metal, recovered matter and sound.
Matter does not forget. The difficulty lies elsewhere: an object that outlives its makers also outlives the language, tools and context needed to read it.
A key reference is the Voyager Golden Record, launched aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977. The gold-plated copper disc contains images, music, voices and sounds from Earth. It travels with a cartridge and a needle, so the means of playback is part of the archive. Its aluminium cover carries a visual system explaining how to play the record, decode its images, locate the Solar System through fourteen pulsars and estimate the time elapsed since launch through the radioactive decay of uranium-238. Material, geometry, sound and physical constants are combined into an artefact conceived for a reader with no shared language or cultural context.
Other documented projects extend this question across different materials and timescales. The Rosetta Disk, developed by the Long Now Foundation, contains more than 13,000 micro-etched pages documenting more than 1,500 human languages. Its text moves progressively from visible to microscopic scale, embedding the first instruction for reading within the object itself. Memory of Mankind records analogue texts and images on ceramic data carriers stored in the Hallstatt salt mine, accompanied by tools intended to help future readers reconstruct contemporary languages.
In 2012, Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures placed one hundred micro-etched images inside a gold-plated shell attached to the EchoStar XVI satellite, transforming an artwork into a potential orbital ruin. In a more urgent context, the 1993 Sandia National Laboratories report investigated how materials, monuments, pictograms, scientific diagrams and layered messages might warn future societies about nuclear waste for 10,000 years.
These projects reveal that preservation is never neutral. Every archive constructs a partial image of its time through what it selects, excludes and makes legible. Durability is therefore only one part of the problem. Matter must retain information, but the object must also anticipate an act of discovery, interpretation and transmission.
Within Elena Pelosi’s practice, the question is already material. In Portal of Memory, stones from Tuscany are set inside the thirteen ceramic pieces of the Fruit of Life, so the place of origin travels with the object. Urban Remains keeps construction waste as a record of a city in transformation. Time Capsules treats recorded sound as a material to be stored and reactivated.
The research asks how matter itself, rather than a label or a screen, might carry origin, duration and the instructions for its own activation. The object is no longer conceived only for the present viewer, but as a possible artefact awaiting an unknown reader.
SOURCES
- NASA – The Golden Record cover
- University of Chicago Magazine – the Golden Record, its cartridge and needle
- The Rosetta Project – The Rosetta Disk
- Memory of Mankind – How is information kept legible for 1 million years?
- Creative Time – Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures
- Sandia National Laboratories, 1993 report on long-term warning markers (UNT Digital Library)