Rising to the Questions of the Cosmos: Ann Druyan, Dario Robleto & Jennifer Roberts in conversation by Block Museum of Art

About the Conversation

From her work in the 1970s as the Creative Director for NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Messaging Project to her current role as writer and producer of the beloved television series Cosmos, Ann Druyan has devoted her life to expanding the horizons of human empathy and communication. In insisting that the thresholds of cosmic exploration must be approached with sincerity, humility, and generosity, she has had a deep influence on artist Dario Robleto’s work throughout his career. The artist has framed the exhibition The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto (January 26 – July 9, 2023) as a gift to Druyan.

In conjunction with The Heart’s Knowledge, The Block hosted a special online conversation with Druyan, Robleto and Jennifer Roberts, Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. Roberts and Robleto are co-authoring a book about the interstellar journey of the pulse wave recordings that Druyan included on the Voyager Golden Record. The conversation ranged from the history of Druyan’s work on the Golden Record with her husband and collaborator Carl Sagan, to ideas of gift-giving, to questions of love, ethics, and truth that are raised when considering a message with a billion-year-timeline.

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Druyan, Robleto and Roberts in conversation March 8, 2023

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The Golden Record cover shown with its extraterrestrial instructions. Credit: NASA/JPL

Jennifer Roberts: What we’re going to be doing tonight is talking about an extraordinary recording that Ann Druyan made in 1977. And part of what makes it extraordinary is that it was cut onto an LP record, attached to two space probes, and launched into interstellar space.

In the late summer of 1977, taking advantage of a rare alignment of the giant outer planets, NASA launched two identical probes that would give us our first close look at the vastness of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 would swing past Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 would continue on to Uranus and Neptune. Both probes would reach escape velocity by using the gravitational energy of the planets as a slingshot. They were thus projected to break free of the solar system and travel unhindered around the galaxy for billions of years. They would likely outlive the Earth itself, perhaps becoming the last material traces of human life in the universe.

This is why there’s a gold-plated phonograph record bolted to the side of each spacecraft. Less than a year before launch, NASA had asked Carl Sagan to lead a team to design a message from Earth for any alien intelligence that might someday intercept the Voyagers. Sagan’s team had only a few months to conceive and create what might well become the most enduring world monument ever designed.

The original plan had been to design a pictorial plaque, but the team soon hit on the brilliant idea to cut an LP record instead, using sound as the eternal carrier of human memory. The record ultimately included four sections. It had a selection of 22 images that had been converted into sound, greetings recorded in 59 languages, an audio essay tracing the history of Earth sounds from volcanoes to rockets, and most famously, a sampler of music, 27 recordings from around the world, from Senegalese percussion, to Mozart’s Magic Flute , to Louis Armstrong’s melancholy blues.

In 2013, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space by passing through the heliopause, which is basically the boundary of the protective bubble that the solar wind blows around the solar system. It was the first human-made object ever to do so, and it was followed in 2018 by Voyager 2.

The two Voyagers are now more than 14 and 12 billion miles away, respectively. Remarkably, they’re still transmitting crucial scientific data back to us, but their onboard batteries will die soon, probably within the next 10 years. They will then go silent to us, given over to the galaxy. Their only remaining transmissions will be the phantom sounds held in the grooves of the Golden Records they carry.

Ann Druyan was the creative director of the Golden Record Project. She was also responsible for assembling the evolutionary sound essay that I mentioned. At some point during the process of selecting recordings of crackling flames and crickets, she and Sagan realized that they were in love with each other and secretly became engaged. Around this time, Ann also came up with a radical idea for a new kind of recording to add to the record. At the very last minute before the record had to be cut in June of 1977, she recorded a track that would simply be titled “Life Signs.” If you listen to this recording, you’ll hear about a minute’s worth of rushing, fuzzing static, interrupted by occasional pops, “a fierce sound,” as she has described it. This sound is arguably the strangest thing humans have ever sent into space.

Ann, I’d love to have you start by giving us an introduction to this remarkable recording of yours. It has inspired Dario’s entire exhibition here at The Block, and now the book that he and I are writing together. Can you just tell us some backstory? So this fierce sound of yours, what is it?

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Ann Druyan: It’s an absolutely exquisite day in June, 1977. Imagine the sky so blue, the sun is shining. And as you mentioned Carl Sagan, and I, in the course of a phone call discussing the music for the Voyager record, uttered those first syllables of our feelings for each other. We had never kissed. We had known each other for years. We had never even winked at each other or giggled about the thought of being together. And in this one magical phone call, all of a sudden, the gates of the wonder world swing open and we declare our feelings for each other and in the course of 20 seconds decide to marry. For me, it was like the discovery of a scientific truth. I’ve never actually discovered a scientific truth, but that’s what it felt like. It had that great power to it. This was during the mastering of the Voyager record while I was doing the sound essay

Within about 48 hours of this revelation of our feelings for each other, I asked Carl, as we were walking down 52nd Street, “Would it be possible if I were to meditate for an hour, was it conceivable that the extraterrestrials of our imagination could possibly reinterpret my message? The message within the message, a kind of palimpsest?” And Carl towered over me, and I looked up at him, and an enormous smile, a beautiful, radiant Carl smile. He said, “Well, a billion years is a long time, Annie. Go do it.”

So within 24 hours, I was at NYU Medical Center in this completely black room, totally dark, while a computer probably the size of, a tractor-trailer with perhaps the computing power of a fraction of what you have in your phone right now, is taking my rapid eye movement, my heart sounds, my brain waves, my electroencephalogram, everything, every signal my body’s putting out. My eyes are closed. I have a mental itinerary with many bases I wanted to step on. I wanted to tell something of the story of our world to my limited abilities, the story of our civilization, the juncture we found ourselves at the height of the Cold War,

during the worst of the nuclear arms race, at a time when one in five of us was literally starving to death and did not have potable water or adequate shelter. Could I convey this great story of ours?

And I allowed myself the great luxury at the end of this mental journey to meditate about the glory, the joy of being alive and of being in love. And I wanted to be as comprehensive in my thinking about love and all the different kinds of love that there are, as diverse and as complete as we tried to be in our musical portrait of the great traditions of the world. That’s what I did. That hour of meditation was compressed into less than a minute of sound. And that is the penultimate sound you hear in the sound essay on the Voyager interstellar message.

It is in a way the most intimate sound on the record, although there is a mother’s first words to her newborn baby, there is a kiss, there are other very personal kinds of sounds, but this one, this one is straight from the heart. And it’s the sound you hear before the last sound in the sound essay, which is that of the most distant object that we had ever recorded at that time, which is the sound of a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star, which gives a very specific signal and which sounds in a way related to these interior sounds. That experience,

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“That experience, that June day, that love which proved to be so true, lives on—perhaps for 1 to 5 billion years—as it moves, probably making a dozen circumnavigations of the Milky Way galaxy in the course of its long lifetime .”

that June day, that love which proved to be so true, lives on—perhaps for 1 to 5 billion years—as it moves, probably making a dozen circumnavigations of the Milky Way galaxy in the course of its long lifetime.

Jennifer Roberts: Well, thank you Ann, for that rich response. And I’d also just like to say we won’t have a lot of time to discuss this today, but the sequencing of Ann’s sound essay on the Golden Record is a remarkable work of art in itself. It’s a remarkable work of DJ culture, if nothing else. Dario, you wanted to talk a bit about your own encounter with this recording.

Dario Robleto: Ann, thank you as always. I’ve heard you tell that story many times, and every time it gets to me as if I’ve heard it for the first time. That’s what’s so beautiful— you convey that. It’s like you’re telling it the first time every time. I know I’ve told you this many times, but I first encountered that recording when I was seven. Of course, I had none of the context you beautifully laid out. That came many years later when you talked about it publicly. I was left with just the strangeness of it as sound. And I actually misunderstood NASA. I thought they were claiming that these were sounds we had received from aliens. And this further mystified me because I couldn’t understand why they would include such a strange sequence of static when presumably the point was to be clear. Again, this is a sevenyear-old thinking of this way too rationally.

Once I did know the story—that humans had, in fact, sent this—the recording still enraptured me. Here I am four decades later, still thinking about it. I can’t believe I get to think about it with you. I pinch myself all the time. But it has been a lifetime of deep reflection. And once I learned more about it, like the beautiful story you told, it became clear that there was a layer of beauty and subversiveness as a gift. “Gift” is a very important word that means a lot to Jennifer and me. That’s what I would like people to understand. This exhibition is a love letter

to you. It is an artist pondering, “How in the world do you return a gift like I feel you gave to humanity and the cosmos?” And the show is anchored on a question: “What does one gift to the only woman whose heart and mind have left the solar system?”

And, for the past decade, I’ve tried to answer that. And it’s taken me to some incredible places, like locating the first heart ever recorded in history, where I think your story begins, and discovering the first time a dream was registered as a brainwave, a story I know that means a lot to you. As much as I have enjoyed trying to find gifts worthy of the one you’ve given, there’s one other framing question I’d like to put on the table for us tonight: Why should an artist and an art historian be making a deep analysis of what is essentially a scientific project?

I hope the answer to that question is the deepest layer of a gift to you. We are making a strong claim here, Jennifer and I, which is that even though what you did was asked in the language of science, recorded with the tools of science, and literally bolted to the side of a scientific experiment, I don’t feel that we can truly understand and appreciate what you accomplished unless we fold in the arts and humanities to understanding it. Our most substantial claim is that, in fact, the Golden Record, and your recording in particular, are actually phenomenal works of subversive conceptual art that art history hasn’t entirely accounted for, and we’re trying to correct for that.

I will make this claim that it’s not only art but subversive art. The word subversion is important to me, and I think to you. There’s a definition of art that Jennifer and I are fond of offered by the poet Adrienne Rich. She writes that art functions as “the breaker of official silences.” That art is designed to rupture through despair and cannot be separated from a search for human dignity and hope. And, of course, in her time, as in ours, by “official silences,” she meant any form of power that would

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Graphic Credit: Scientific America by Matthew Twombly and Juan Velasco (5W Infographic); Consultants: John Richardson (principal investigator, Voyager Plasma Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Space Research) and Merav Opher (professor, Department of Astronomy, Boston University)

interfere with whom one chooses to love and how one expresses that love. I think, more broadly, it’s a comment on any form of power that might keep one quiet when they want to speak from their heart. And there’s something about that definition of art that we feel aligns with the spirit of what you did. In your own way, you were the breaker of official silences.

How does that sit with you? Is calling it art—and not only that, but subversive art— does this hold some weight or importance to you? And when you were making it, did it feel that way? Did it feel like a creative act, one that might even have been subversive, or am I completely overstating this?

Ann Druyan: Well, I am humbled by what you have said this evening, and I feel unworthy, but yes it does. I came of age in the 1960s. My interest in science was, and I couldn’t do the math, I was interested in the history of science and in he political implications of materialism and of science. And of the first scientists, the Ionian scientists of ancient Greece, the merchants, not the Platonists, not the aristocrats, but the guys who rolled up their sleeves, and women, and did the work and did the experiments and really wanted to know how nature works. The most radical idea of all, as far as I’m concerned, is not to resort to the shorthand of, because God wants it, or because God did it, but to say that there is a cause that can be known and to try to never get the absolute truth, but get little successive approximations of reality by being disciplined, by being rigorous, by being dispassionate. But then once you get those riches, then you can be passionate, then you can soar.

And in your observations about the scientific basis of the Voyager mission and, the genius of the engineers and the scientists, that’s absolutely right. That is the material basis that made this possible. But I think the existence of the Voyager record and the fact that it straddles the world of science and the world of art, and that those two

worlds meet in this one project seamlessly, elegantly, without any tension or friction but in a kind of beautiful true marriage, is a tribute to Carl Sagan, who had equal parts of skepticism and wonder, of rigor and discipline, and, free flying imagination and poetry.

And because he was so comfortable with those different realms, and he was not a creature of one or the other, but both, it was possible to communicate the genius of the engineers and the scientists. Just remember, it’s not until 1957 that any human being has ever been able to send anything off the Earth into space. And that was Sputnik, of course. Only 20 years later, here we have this interstellar craft that is still functioning 40, 46 years after launch, still working flawlessly, both of them. And so it was possible to take that brilliant science and engineering and then to make it a wonderful launch pad for our feelings, our emotions, our music, our dreams.

And in terms of subversion, absolutely, because you have to remember that now, NASA is a much more forward, frontalfacing agency than it was back then. Back then, it kind of almost bitterly resented anyone who tried to tear down those walls that separate most of us from the scientific experience. And in those days, they looked at Carl Sagan like he was a problem because they didn’t understand that public-funded science needs public enthusiasm, but moreover, a democracy based on science and high technology must have citizens who understand the values, the methods of science. Or otherwise, we will lose even the little democracy that we have been able to achieve. So yes, subversive. There were things I’m sure, that NASA would’ve preferred if they could have controlled my thoughts. I’m sure they would’ve preferred there were places I didn’t go. And that line from Bob Dylan kept racing around my head the entire time: “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head

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in a guillotine. It’s all right, Ma.” That’s what I was feeling, was, here is this, I found this way. And I just want to say one final thing, and that is when Carl first mentioned this project to Timothy Ferris and to me, and asked us to lead it, the first thing that I thought of, I said, “Well, how long is it going to last?” He said, “1 to 5 billion years.” Goosebumps everywhere, this tingling feeling. And the sense here is a canvas, the likes of which no artist has ever had before. Here is the opportunity for a conceptual art piece that is virtually the closest thing to eternal that we have ever touched. And so it was a way to reward the great musicians and artists whose music could live forever, or virtually forever, and, it just was, Dario, we’ve talked about this so many times. I can’t tell you, I think about it every day, and I think, and every day I think I find, if not something completely new, certainly a thrill virtually almost as great as I felt in 1977.

Jennifer Roberts: That’s great. I think about this every day as well, and I can attest that certainly for me, it’s kept me thinking in new directions, everywhere I go. And it’s been

organs in an unreadable script intended for an audience of aliens, right? I mean, it sounds totally preposterous. It’s fringe even in the context of the Golden Record, which is already really weird.

And then there’s the whole question of whether you were able to actually implant your thoughts into that waveform, whether it could ever possibly be deciphered by any alien, whether it could actually be found as it sort of wanders alone in this vast interstellar emptiness. We’ll return to some of those issues at the end of this program. And Dario and I have it always in view as we write. But we really insisted on taking your ambitions for this track seriously, and we really want to understand the stakes of what you did in 1977 as well as a billion years from now. And we think it’s really important to wrestle with all the challenges that your recording poses to the status quo and to the standard ways of thinking, all the ways that it is a breaker of official silences.

such a provocative way to think about the arts, which is sort of my home discipline. I wanted to just follow up on the subversion issue a little bit and really take a minute to sit with the sheer audacity of your recording, which I think can sometimes perhaps make some people feel like it should be dismissed out of hand., You’ve got this final accounting of Earth written as the physiological duet between two internal

One of the things we’re doing a lot is thinking about the way your recording is itself unique on the Golden Record, like how it’s different from everything else that’s already on the Golden Record when you made your recording. So for example, yours is arguably the only track on the record that’s completely unintelligible to humans, right? Ironically, it’s the track that emerges most intimately from human experience, but it’s the one that most thoroughly eludes human understanding. It’s the one that sounds like it’s coming from an alien, as Dario attested in his own experience. Of course, your track is also encrypted because of this. Anything you put in there was instantly hidden from you and your team members, and also conveniently NASA officials. It’s also the only track that’s as much about what we don’t know as it is about what we do. The rest of the record is really in some ways a proclamation of our knowledge. It’s like, “Hey, we know all about pulsars,”

But yours is more humble and vulnerable,

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“And in those days, they looked at Carl Sagan like he was a problem because they didn’t understand that public-funded science needs public enthusiasm ”

right? It’s not a fact, it’s kind of a blinking question mark. It says, “Can you read this? We can’t. We made this, but we don’t know what it means.” And so in this vein, I wanted to kind of open up a conversation about emotion because Dario and I have been thinking that one of the key ways that your track is unique on the record is in the way it conveys the significance of human emotions. It’s incredibly complex, first of all. It captures this welter of emotional states. While you’re thinking, emotional states are sort of bubbling up and entangling with conceptual states in a really interesting way that we could argue sort of erodes the boundary between thought and feelings. And then of course, it’s also much more direct, you could say, than any other expression of emotion on the record. And you already attested a little bit to this when you said it comes straight from the heart, right? It doesn’t just carry information about emotion, it actually carries an enactment of it. So you didn’t just sit there and think about your feelings about Carl, you actually had those feelings all that vertiginous, ecstatic, turbulent, and probably slightly terrifying feeling of having just fallen in love. And you had those right there while the EEG was doing the recording.

We’d love to hear more from you about the role of emotion on the Golden Record and in the whole project more generally. How did the team debate this, the role of emotion, how or whether emotion can be a kind of communicable aspect of human life to aliens? What were these discussions like? The team did attempt to get emotion on the record, especially in the inclusion of so much music, which is really, I think, the primary place where that happens. But is there a sense in which you feel that your recording is different from the music on the record? In what ways is your recording either altering or augmenting the Golden Record’s attitude towards emotion more generally?

Ann Druyan: What a great question, Jennifer. Well one of the central debates, the one that kept us up very late at night, one night at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the six principal collaborators on the record stayed up until I think four o’clock in the morning. And the question was, do we try to make a good impression on the extraterrestrials? After all, this is our first attempt to do more than just have a license plate on a spacecraft, as the Pioneer 10 plaque was. There are many different statements being made, in many different ways, by the material music, the images on the record. And the question was, do we try to put our best foot forward and really act like we’ve got our act together? Or do we show how deeply troubled we are as a civilization, as a species? How the crisis, the current crisis that we were even beginning to confront back then in 1977, and we are now in a more, I’d say overt phase of this crisis. But even back then, the terror of nuclear war, of environmental depredation, was already very much on people’s minds. And the question was do we show Auschwitz? Cambodia? Do we show what the Belgians did in the Congo? Do we show what the Europeans did on North and South America, everywhere? I mean, really, how real do we want to make this? And it was true that we had to have the NASA administration people come to the recording studio to vet the record.

There were some hairy moments where we were playing the Javanese gamelan music, and these guys and with the pocket protectors and the short sleeves, and the crew cuts, they were, if you can imagine back then, they were completely like: “What is this? They were really expecting it was all going to be American popular music, and we really shocked them when we tried to have world music, because world music wasn’t even a concept then. I knew that if I was allowed to record my brainwaves and to meditate, I could actually say a lot more than could ever be said out loud in a way

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Dario Robleto’s work introduces audiences to the story of The Golden Record. Installation view, The Aorta of an Archivist, 2021.UHD video, 5.1 surround sound installation; Running time: 53:00. Image: Sean Su Photography

that other humans could interpret.

And I didn’t do this to be naughty. I did this because I felt that we were in very deep trouble already as a species, and I wanted to bear witness to the fact that we had some self-awareness, that we knew what was happening to us, that we weren’t just going over the edge of the cliff like a bunch of lemmings, that we had yearnings to straighten ourselves out, to feed each other, to take better care of each other, and to take better care of the planet. And so I felt that this was much more than just a sign of selfish, narcissistic opportunity for me to shout it from the rooftops that I was madly in love with someone so fantastic a person as Carl. It was much more this desire to convey our condition, to convey our plight.

The gist of the message is simply, first of all, a series of repetitions, constant repetitions. I got that from the Rosetta Stone and from Champollion’s decryption of it, which I took as a kind of a model for all communication with other civilizations that we don’t have direct contact with, as Champollion established contact, one-way contact, with the ancient Egyptians. Their methodology in the Rosetta Stone was, two other languages, phrases repeated. I was repeating these thoughts almost a little bit like a prayer, really. The way that we pray, remembering over and over again that this is where we came from, this is who we are, we are part of this fabric of life that we are slashing away at. And this is the crisis that we find ourselves in, but we’re reaching out because we want to endure and we want to become citizens of the cosmos someday.

This is our baby step in your direction, extraterrestrials, to connect with you, to show you how great it was to be alive. And, the falling in love part fit very nicely with this larger message. I was saying in my heart, that that’s part of what our hope is, is that we have the capacity to love each other. And what does that do? What does that mean? It means we have the capacity to care as

much about other people as we care about ourselves. That’s our hope. That’s what I felt like I was trying to do. And I knew as I was doing it that I was probably the luckiest person who ever lived in so many different ways that day. And I still feel that way.

Jennifer Roberts: Wow, that’s a wonderful response. I’ve been thinking so much about how the great potential of the recording technology you used is that it actually sort

of recorded two tracks. It was sort of the thoughts that you had, but then also your feelings about those thoughts. So as you’re narrating the history of the Earth, you’re also recording your emotional response to that information. So you’re able, supposedly or hopefully, to convey things like shame and ambivalence about our history, right?

So you’re actually conveying, perhaps to some future listener, the fact that we are complex, intelligent beings. And maybe that’s even synonymous with intelligence, to have that kind of soul searching as part of the way we think about ourselves. And I also love that you didn’t just send information

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“I was repeating these thoughts almost a little bit like a prayer, really. The way that we pray, remembering over and over again that this is where we came from, this is who we are, we are part of this fabric of life that we are slashing away at... We’re reaching out because we want to endure and we want to become citizens of the cosmos someday.”

about consciousness, but that you sent the fact that we have a conscience as a species as well.

I think it’s worth pointing out that it is really subversive for a woman in 1977 to have put love on a space probe that is now 14 billion miles away at the very edge of human exploration and adventure, right? Because throughout the history of Western civilization, exploration and love have usually been organized in opposition and also in a kind of gender binary, right? The general story goes that men push outward into adventure and risk and expansion and keep their emotions under control, and women stay home, waiting and holding the family together and performing emotional work. And I’ve been reading “The Odyssey” and I’m struck how this is the very definition of what it means to do something that’s epic. Odysseus sails bravely off to the edge of the known world, and Penelope stays behind weaving a shroud. But, you put love on the ship, right? You put the net menders up on the bridge with the admirals, and that is pretty amazing.

Ann Druyan: Thank you, Jennifer. That is such a high compliment. I just have to say that you really, you nailed it, because years later Carl and I wrote the treatment for what would become the novel and the motion picture “Contact,” and why did we do that? Because we were so fed up with stories about men going on these epic journeys and women staying home. And we wanted to tell the story of a woman who goes on an epic journey and the men stay home. And that was the complete genesis of “Contact” and Eleanor Arroway, was the dream of creating an odyssey, not on the level of Homer, but an odyssey in which a woman is a traveler and the men wait at home, undoing and undoing the tapestry.

Dario Robleto: As I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, this show is framed as a gift to you, Ann, for all the gifts I feel you’ve given. And I’m so proud to say that

we’ve become friends in the process. And as I was preparing for the show, it reminded me of the angst I felt early on—“How in the world can I give a gift back to Ann Druyan that’s worthy of the gift I imagined you had given us?” And, the breakthrough for that initial gift to you, ten years ago now, was when I was rereading your reflections about the story you just alluded to—the team meetings about the sound selection process.

And in particular, you mentioned in this beautiful book I’ve read many times, Murmurs of Earth —the book you and the team released soon after launch. But you talk deeply—I mean, it amounts to a few paragraphs, but clearly, this moment moved you—where you were tasked with looking for sounds of the natural world and animal life and went to the Library of Congress to look for those sounds. And you were met, along with those recordings, with something that deeply moved you. So much so that it was the inspiration, as I understand it, of the meeting you were just referring to.

So I would love to share the actual story of that initial gift to you, but I’d love it if you could help set it up in the sense of—can you dig in a little more to that day? What was it like to go hunting for the perfect sound of a cricket and then met with a recording of the ways humans can destroy themselves? And then further, if you could tell us more about that day, but also the fact that this recording didn’t actually make it onboard. But as far as I can tell, it did change the philosophical direction of the record in an interesting way that I don’t think is as widely known. So would you mind telling us about that day and the sound that moved you so deeply?

Ann Druyan: Yes! At the Library of Congress, wonderful curator helping us, and a technician, to listen to the treasury of recorded sound that they have there. The

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Exhibition visitors listen to Ann Druyan’s recording for The Golden Record. Dario Robleto, The Pulse Armed With a Pen (An Unknown History of the Human Heartbeat), 2014. 28 custom cut 5-inch vinyl records, audio recordings, archival digital prints (record sleeves, liner notes, labels, slides), three centuries of various human pulse and heartbeat tracings, glass slides, custom bound book, oak, silk, engraved gold mirror, brass, headphones, media players. Image Sean Su Photography.

technician takes out this very heavy, very heavy long playing record. I can’t remember, and Dario you might remember better than I do because you’ve turned this into something so much deeper, as you always do. You’ve taken so much of the Voyager record and with your forensic genius and your love of history and your understanding of how much deeper a resource history is to the artist than irony, and that’s one of the many reasons your work really stands out for me.

A technician puts this sound on the record machine, and it’s very repetitious, and it’s a voice, which I believe is saying one word, something like fire. And then there’s a kind of report, there’s a kind of a sound, and then he says it again. And it turns out to have been, according to the library, the very first recording of actual warfare ever made. And at that moment, that’s all that I knew about it. This is before Dario begins to delve and search and plumb and find the truth behind it, which is much greater, of course, than just this one superficial little anecdote.

But what was so striking to me was the banality of it. If there was a sound that was the opposite of my heart flying out of my chest with joy at love, it would probably be the sound of this canister, gas canister, maybe a poison gas canister or something like that, that’s firing over and over again. And there’s nothing Homeric about it. It is completely banal and meaningless and repetitious and kind of just, it has no music to it at all. It’s a horrible, hideous, ugly, dull sound. And it’s the sound of warfare, of destruction, which is happening right this moment as we’re speaking in Bakhmut in Ukraine. These same ugly, hideous sounds are being made.

And question was, do we include something like that on this interstellar message of how messed up we are? Or do we let the crickets sing and the birds and the humpback whales and the humans making their best music? Or do we tell them that there’s

something very wrong with us? Dario, what you discovered about that recording, it still amazes me.

Dario Robleto: Well, that was an initial way to think about giving you something that might matter to you, and knowing how much it moved you, I gave myself the task of finding out more about that recording. And I went back; I tried to retrace your steps; I tried to hear that recording myself. And I’ll summarize it as best I can, although it’s worthy of a longer discussion

But the point is, it was recorded by a man named Will Gaisberg, and as you point out, it was in the final months of the war, of World War I. The armistice was about to be signed, and Will was sent to the front lines to record the sound—the first time someone made a live recording on a battlefield. And he records the firing of these mustard gas shells in France by a British artillery unit pushing the Germans back on the front line. But what I learned that adds layers of heartbreak to the story is that Will was out there because of an idea that we’ve forgotten about today, a famous phrase that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” And it’s sort of this thing we just hear in history.

But, if we reckon with why they said this in 1918, it’s really insightful—that term was coined because people thought, “How could we ever do this again?” This war was so horrifying that people actually entertained the notion that war might be going extinct on the planet. It is hard, in 2023, for any of us to get back there. But it gives you an insight into how horrifying that war was that people even entertained this idea conceptually. So when you fold that into what Will did, he’s out there, I think we can say, with the sense of a moral obligation about recording humanity in all of its depth—the good and the bad— so that the future might remember and learn from it.

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Unfortunately, as Will made the recording, he didn’t correctly apply his gas mask and inhaled some of the mustard gas, destroying his lungs, and he died a few weeks later. So that recording never really got the due it deserved. But fast forward 60 years, and Ann, if anybody should have heard it, it was you.

You heard what I think Will hoped someone would hear one day. The interconnectivity of these events gives me goosebumps because of all the people that could have heard it, it was you. Fast forward 60 years, and you are given a similar task through the power of recording: What do we owe the future? What is the moral obligation to tell a complete picture of humanity? And that’s why I wanted to flesh it out. It’s an incredible story, and I was happy to give it to you, knowing it mattered.

I want to read two sentences of something you wrote in Murmurs that really matter to me. You also asked this question: “How realistic a portrait of life on Earth do we wish to convey? Was the Voyager message to be a historical gesture? Or merely a social one? If we showed ourselves as we really are, a species involved with struggle, wouldn’t we at least be assured of the record’s value as an accurate document?”

And Ann, you asked this question when others didn’t. I want to pull out the provocation of what you did. Not only did you hear that recording, you rose to the moral obligation passed down through time— by Will to you—to ask what the power of recording means to document humanity in all of its complexity. And for the most radical form of a distant future we could imagine.

Of course, you did think about war, and you did think about shame and poverty and environmental devastation. I hope everyone will absorb that this act was as beautiful and radical a thought to have as thinking about love—it was equally, in my opinion, as radical and as essential to

show a spectrum, to give a full accounting of the good and the bad that humanity was capable of. You broke an official silence, and you did it through this subversion of a brainwave. I would love for you to reflect on that a bit more. Did Will’s recording call to you in a moral sense in the way that falling in love with Carl did—the way falling in love called on you to think: “We are also beings that love”? And did Will’s recording do something in the other way—that we are beings that also know how to harm each other, and we’re working on it?

Ann Druyan: Yes. I mean, completely. That’s who we are. There’s no denying it. There’s no way of pretending that the fact that some of us are lucky enough to find love

and to live out that love, that that’s entirely who we are. We are the whole, we are the complete and total story of our tragedy and our crimes and our failures, all of that. And, somebody once told me, I don’t know if this is true, you and Jennifer probably would know much better, but like, that forgeries have a very finite shelf life, that they can even persuade sometimes knowledgeable people that they’re real.

It’s like when you watch a Hollywood movie which is a historical recreation, and as the years pass, you begin to see those aspects of the hairdos and the costumes and the sets that are more a reflection of the minute in which they were made than true historical accuracy. The wigs and things like that, appeal to a certain aesthetic of that moment. They’re not really true to the original period that they’re trying to depict. And that’s what I thought about the record

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“ What do we owe the future? What is the moral obligation to tell a complete picture of humanity?”

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Dario Robleto discusses his work and Ann Druyan’s story with Northwestern University students. Image Sean Su Photography

that it didn’t matter if we put our best foot forward. Lies have a very brief shelf life. Art may be long, but lies are short because nature, all of nature is a product of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution at this point. There is so many causality skeins, too many to untie and retie to tell a lie that will be as effective and long-lasting as nature itself.

My feeling was keep it real. Let’s be real about this. Let’s say who we really are because as Carl said, the spacecraft itself will speak volumes about who we are, about our level of technological sophistication in 1977, and lack thereof. There was no hope of deceiving beings, putative beings of other worlds and other times. There was no point in it. How can you be embarrassed in front of the extraterrestrials of a billion years from now? It’s pointless. You just might as well be who you really are.

And one thing I’d like to say is about the gift-giving, which is at the heart of this whole thing. After all, this was a gift. We always knew that the message had two kinds of recipients: our fellow earthlings of the present back then and of the future, and these extraterrestrials that we dream of. Two very different audiences. We knew that if we tried to pretend to be other than what we were, it wouldn’t be very effective anyway. And it would be a hollow, it would be false. We felt that if we just gave it everything we had, like love, you must give everything that you have in order to to experience the fullness therein, it was the same thing with the record. We wanted to give it everything we had. We wanted to be as truthful as we could possibly be. And we wanted to do justice to the great beauty of being alive, because we felt that gift.

And I was very lucky and so was Carl in that our parents taught us never to go anywhere without bringing a gift. But it was a cultural thing and an emotional thing, and we came from the same culture and the same parents essentially, even though they were

different people, they were interchangeable in many ways. And the idea was that if you go somewhere, you always bring something. And it’s just a gesture. It’s more symbolic sometimes than anything else, but that’s what life is,. We were so lucky because our parents had given us so much love and so much attention and so much effort and patience, and so we were just passing it on.

Dario Robleto: I’ll add that one of our favorite quotes of yours, Ann, is, “You can’t lie your way to the stars.” There’s a provocation there. If you’re in the business of sending interstellar messages—and I don’t know that it’s obvious to say this— but lying doesn’t make sense in the logic of “forever” and potential communication over billions of years. That’s quite an interesting step to take to an ethical stance. Most of us don’t think about billion-year archival problems like you had to. You come to it with such humility—like, well, of course, it should be a gift! Of course, we shouldn’t lie! Of course, we should lead with love! Of course, imagining that we should send out our generals on first contact is silly! What about our Yoko Onos, Billie Holidays, Ann Carsons, and Ann Druyans? Why not put them front and center? That’s not an obvious or easy stance for anyone to make in that context. And you did, and I want to honor that properly.

Ann Druyan: This is another way of understanding how great Carl Sagan really was, because when he was setting out to do this I didn’t have any credentials. He just knew me. We had worked together on a project. He knew how I thought. For him to stand up at NASA headquarters and say, “Well, there’s this young woman who I think would really be good leading this project,” must have felt very uncomfortable to him. But that’s who he was. It was a very sexist time. I remember when I was working on that record, I very often got thrown out of offices because people said, “They sent a little girl? NASA sent a little girl to get my

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sounds from my sound laboratory? Why did they send a girl,” Or I wouldn’t even get to finish a sentence. People would hang up on me. And I was so used to being interrupted and unheard. I just want to say that at age 73, having had this incredibly lucky existence, that’s another thing that gives me a lot of hope. When I was a young woman, it was really hard to be heard, even if you did have authority and credentials. And that’s something that I think has changed a bit. We’re not all the way there, but wow, the difference is palpable and it’s a good thing. It’s a really good thing. It was really a tribute to Carl, because he looked at me and he said, “You should be the director of this record.” That was insane. Its just another metric of how he thought. He was so unconventional in his instincts and his thinking.

Michael Metzger: It’s time for me to begin bringing some questions to you all from our audience. How do you see the fields of art and science collaborating in the future? And what space do you think art has in the scientific world?

Ann Druyan: I’m sorry to be referring to Carl so much, but I really feel that he’s very much a part of why this turned out the way it did. He got a lot of grief from the scientific community and the academic community because of his desire to tear down that wall between science and the rest of culture. And he saw what was then a predominantly white male priesthood of science that spoke in a jargon that was deliberately unintelligible to anyone else outside this priesthood as a real problem for our civilization, because he understood, having done his PhD thesis as a very young man on the greenhouse effect on Venus, he was more keenly aware than most, starting in early 1961, of the danger of climate change.

And he was also very concerned about the fact that there was such a very superficial amount of scientific literacy distributed

among the citizenry, among the people. And he saw that as a kind of deadly embrace between ignorance, magical thinking, a tendency to leap to some of the logical fallacies that plague human existence as a big danger in not only a nuclear-armed world, but in a world, as I said, so dependent on science and high technology. He very often said that it was his education at the University of Chicago, and the curriculum there, which meant that every astronomer, physicist, and geologist had to read the Upanishads, had to read the literature not just of Western Europe, but of the whole world, had to understand a kind of multicultural, diverse perspective on human existence before you could be a first-rate geologist.

And this was a concept that was very unusual at the time, and it really made a difference in his life because when he was debating, for instance creationism, the desire not to teach Darwinian evolution or any kind of evolution in the schools, his ability to quote the sacred texts better than the upholders of these religious traditions was a tremendous asset. To me, apart from my inability to do the math, to me the difference between the joy and the rapture that you can feel when you understand a little bit about nature, which is the source of everything, it really amuses me that, or not amuses me, it breaks my heart is probably more like it, that we are squandering the precious things, our air, our climate, our water, our environment. We’re squandering those things for things that are not precious at all, and that are completely just agreedupon fictions that we have decided to value above those things we need to live. That’s the race we’re in.

How can we, as Kafka said, melt that frozen sea inside us so that we can awaken and act in defense of our home, of our children, of their future? What will it take? That’s the

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mystery. And it will take everything we have, which means our art, our culture, our music, our science, our history, everything. We have to marshal everything we have in defense of our future. That’s our only hope.

Michael Metzger: Oh, beautiful. If you could please tell us about the decision to send the artifacts via sound. One of our audience members is curious about the interest to send a sound object.

course, with our newly acquired genius for miniaturization, people ask me, “Well, if you were making the Voyager record right now, what would you put on it?” I would just send the entire worldwide web, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it.

Because, as we were saying earlier, there’s no point in lying, number one. And number two, this really is who we are, and it’s more democratic, actually, than virtually anything else that we have because so many hands have touched it. It it puts the Library of Alexandria to shame, it puts the greatest libraries in the history of humanity to shame. The greatest libraries have had 10 million books. This is many, many times more information than that. And you would get a really good sense of who we are.

To me, back in 1977, there was a point to being a curator because we didn’t have that decentralized pool of art and science and information that would’ve told so much about us. You had to be a curator because you had to pick and choose certain things. But that’s no longer absolutely necessary, I don’t think. I would never make another Voyager record because I really do think we gave it everything we had. But I would be happy to see just everything out there living forever, and just imagining what the fate of all that information might be someday.

Ann Druyan: Why sound? Well, part of it was the information density potential in a phonograph record. I often laughed to myself that it was a really good thing that eight-track was not the technology of the moment that all America was dancing to. We were looking for durability, which was possible when you were engraving these sound waves into the metal of the record. If you want something to last between 1 and 5 billion years, that’s a big consideration. And the other thing was that there was so much more, as I said, there was so much more information that you could pack into that record digitally than you could possibly hope to contain it in something that would be much heavier and bigger. Now, of

Dario Robleto: Can I add one point there, Ann? It’s not a disagreement. I rarely disagree with you. But part of the argument Jennifer and I are making about—“Why this is art?”—one of those reasons is the constraints you faced. Because you had roughly an hour and a half storage capacity to do the job—rather than sending the internet—I would call what you did art because of the curation you just alluded to, that everything had to be labored and thought over—the sequencing; sequencing matters.

Ann Druyan: Well,.. the record was a gesture. It was a first and it was a beginning. And I’m

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“ We are squandering the precious things, our air, our climate, our water, our environment . We’re squandering those things for things that are not precious at all, and that are completely just agreedupon fictions that we have decided to value above those things we need to live. That’s the race we’re in.”

very proud of it, but it was a different time than this time is. I would send the human genome, I would send the world wide web. I would send as much as I could. It would be a kind of virtual existence for our civilization beyond the life of our civilization, So, it’s not quite the same kind of thing, but it’s what I would do now.

Jennifer Roberts: One thing I would point out, especially to the younger people in the audience, is just how significant it was that there actually was no internet when you made the record. Because if you try to imagine collecting even just the sound essay, collecting some world music. You had like two months to do this, you can’t just download it. You had to get on a plane and fly to DC and go sit in a room and listen to some physical records. There was no internet. Even just doing this compilation was physically arduous. It was a sculpture because of that.

Ann Druyan: You’re so right, Jennifer. There was a lot of footwork. There was a lot of schlepping around. I found myself in Indian appliance stores trying to find the greatest vocal raga of all time. It was detective work, and it was exciting because we knew so little about so many of these musical traditions, and we were appropriately aware of our limitations and our ignorance. So we were asking experts on many different areas; some of them were academics, composers, musicologists. We had to arrive at a consensus. We wanted to represent the whole world. Americans never heard the music of many different cultures under any circumstances outside of school. Not at all. It really was a challenge, but God, it was fun.

Jennifer Roberts: It must have been a kind of delirium. That’s how I imagine it.

Ann Druyan: That’s the perfect word. It was a sense of delirium, and also a sense that I was in wonderland, that I had stumbled into this wonderland of endless possibilities. That’s the record. I mean literally, literally

infinite possibility. Who knows?

The universe is so big that those records, those two spacecraft, have been moving at almost 40,000 miles an hour since 1977. And the universe is so big that Voyager 1, which is furthest away, is not even a single light day from us yet. That’s how big the universe is. It’s so ambitious, this project, and at the same time, so humbling. So humbling to realize 50, 70,000 years before it gets to the nearest door.

Michael Metzger: Well, I think we have time for one more question. Thank you, Ann, for your gorgeous reflections on the Golden Record and your life with Carl. You spoke to the ethical and political lessons we can learn from the Golden Record. What authors and ideas in our contemporary moment do you see as continuing this work?”

Ann Druyan: Wow, oh, that’s a great question. That is a very great question. Forgive me, but, I’m thinking about Dario, and about what you’re doing to awaken so many people to the power of these kinds of things and to the meaning of history. I feel like the whole culture has moved into the cosmos during my lifetime and gone from when I was a child to being a little bit oblivious of the rest of the universe, to actually really beginning to live in nature and in the universe, the awakening to the consciousness of other life forms on this planet.

And I’m talking about rigorous scientific research. I’m not talking about just sort of subjective, emotional idealizations of nature, but the realization of how completely clueless we have been in our anthropocentrism as humans on this planet, only thinking of what, only seeing every bee, every tree, everything in nature as being an accessory of ours. We’re leaving that behind, we’re beginning to get a different perspective. And I take that as just a source of great hope and wonder. We are really growing up in ways, kicking and screaming and trying to avoid it, but still

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carries a golden record of sounds and images from Earth in case the spacecraft are intercepted by an extraterrestrial civilization. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Each Voyager carries a golden record of sounds and images from Earth in case the spacecraft are intercepted by an extraterrestrial civilization. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Each Voyager carries a golden record of sounds and images from Earth in case the spacecraft are intercepted by an extraterrestrial civilization. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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really attaining a new degree of maturity. And I see that reflected, actually. I see it actually on television more streaming more than anywhere else, that kind of growing awareness that we’re not the crown of creation and not the center of the universe. I take that as just a huge amount of hope. That wasn’t happening when I was a kid, but it really is happening now.

Dario Robleto: Well, if I could add a little bit there in this continuum—again, I know how well-versed you are in the classics, as you already alluded to, but like with Will Gaisberg, a lesser-known person, you listened. Jennifer and I are only two people of what we would call the “children of Cosmos. ” But we listened to you and Carl. And I love that you’re teasing out that there’s a continuum here, and we each have to listen and decide if we’re going to rise to not only the advances of the previous generation but the questions, the flashing question marks they also left behind. Each generation can’t learn everything, and they hand their “unknowns” to us, asking if we will do something about it. And what I think you and Carl have opened the door to is a type of interstellar ethics. And that’s something that I think about so much; Jennifer does too. I know Michael does.

But I want to give a little shout-out to this process—can we assume that the ethics that we’ve fought for on Earth, the battles we’ve had, the moral arguments about how we are going to treat each other now and in the future—can we assume they’re going to apply once we go off planet? And I really like to ponder this. And you’ve given me the reason to do so. And as I alluded to earlier, some non-intuitive things appear— for example, lying doesn’t make sense in interstellar communications. I love how unexpected that is. How do we draw ethics from something that’s still a huge unknown?

I love the romance of your story, Ann. As you know, I’m the first to try to tell it to people!

But I’ve also taken to heart, as you’ve mentioned, the spirit of skepticism and doubt. And that spirit has forced me to ask: What if we lean into the melancholic side of your gesture? The “melancholic” side is: that we don’t know if anything’s out there to find it. And even if there is, and they do find it, we don’t know if the decipherment problems can be overcome. We can keep going down this long trail of reasons this won’t work.

When I lean into the unlikelihood of any of this working, I have to ask another question: What insight arises from the fact that this might not work? What wisdom can we draw from the fact that in about ten years, the final signal from the Voyager will arrive, and then it will be gone? And we will never get confirmation that the Voyager was “received.” Probably not, I don’t think any time soon, at least. But what wisdom can we draw from this non-intuitive, neverhappened-before scenario? No one has ever put their heart and mind in this situation before—a heart and brain-in-love—now drifting into the darkest voids of spacetime and truly letting it go. How do we still find meaning in a process we might never know succeeded?

Ann Druyan: What a beautiful question, and this is what it means to me. First of all, if you don’t send the record, then we know what the outcome is. But if you send the record, the chance of anyone ever encountering it is more than zero. It’s more than zero, which is a lot, which is a lot. We go from people who were imprisoned on this world for 4 billion years, never leaving it, to being beings who can send these little dandelion seeds into the cosmos. And that gives us a more than zero chance of being remembered, of being alive in some sense, long after we’re gone. Everything in the cosmos dies. Everything.

That’s the lesson, that’s the lesson of life, of art, of science, of everything, is that all we have is now. But this now, which is jacketed

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by before, that 13.8 billion years before, and all that is to come, we’re here together, all of us right now, communicating with each other at the speed of light.

Why? Because our ancestors decided to create a chain of minds that could reach forward into the future, and husband that knowledge, maintain that knowledge, so that we could learn how to connect with each other around this little planet and even into the cosmos. And that’s the wonder of it. That’s so much more than we began with. We made that happen together. And none of us could have done it alone. We only could do it with each other and with generations

of searchers who came before us. So that’s the joy of it.

I’ve imagined countless times, every day of my life since I worked on this project, I’ve imagined the interception and what it would be like. And I’m no closer to having a real sense of that than when I started 46 years ago. But what a joy it is to think of it and to know that it’s possible.

That’s all we can ask for.

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Among Voyager 1’s last photographs was this shot of Earth seen from 3.8 billion miles away, dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot” by Voyager scientist Carl Sagan. Among Voyager 1’s last photographs was this shot of Earth seen from 3.8 billion miles away, dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot” by Voyager scientist Carl Sagan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Dario Robleto, The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed, 2019. [still showing Voyager spacecraft] Two-channel 4K video, color, 5.1 surround sound installation; Running time: 51:00. Installation and video stills courtesy of the artist.

About the Panelists

Dario Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1972 and received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. He lives and works in Houston, TX.

The artist has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1997, most recently at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS (2021); the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019); the McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX (2018); Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2014); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011). His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media including Radiolab, Krista Tippet’s On Being, and the New York Times. In 2008 a 10-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Accompanied by a major monograph, Alloy of Love traveled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington.

Ann Druyan is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning writer, producer and director specializing in the communication of science. Druyan served for 10 years as the elected Secretary of the Federation of American Scientists and began her writing career with the publication of her first novel, A Famous Broken Heart. She was the Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project and Program Director of the first solar sail deep space mission, launched on a Russian ICBM in 2005.

She wrote with her late husband, Carl Sagan, the original 1980s Emmy Award- and Peabody Award-winning TV series “COSMOS: A Personal Voyage.” It is currently the most watched PBS series in global television history. As Founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, since 2000, Druyan has built on the success of the original “COSMOS” television series and produced some of the most acclaimed science-based entertainment, including “COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey” and “COSMOS: Possible Worlds,” which premiered March 2020.

Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, where she teaches art history and material culture with an emphasis on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences. She is the author of numerous books and essays on American art and science from the eighteenth century to the present, and has also curated exhibitions in modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In spring of 2021, she delivered the 70th Annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for the National Gallery of Art, with a series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. She is currently focusing on initiatives to create alliances between the humanities and the STEM fields at Harvard and beyond, and is co-authoring a book with Robleto titled Life Signs: The Tender Science of the Pulsewave.

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Photo credit: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

Credits

The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto is organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, and is curated by Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts. The Block acknowledges with gratitude its partnership with Northwestern University’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, whose leadership support has made possible this exhibition, the associated publication, and the Artist-at-Large residency of Dario

Robleto (2018-2023). The artist-at-large program has been generously supported by the Barry and Mary Ann MacLean Fund for Art and Engineering. Major support is also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Generous support is contributed by the Dorothy J. Speidel Fund, the Bernstein Family Contemporary Art Fund, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Alumnae of Northwestern University. The exhibition publication is also made possible in part by the Sandra

L. Riggs Publications Fund. This conversation was co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as part of their ENERGIES dialogue, a year-long conversation about energies—personal, collective, planetary—from different humanistic perspectives. The Block Museum of Art also acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Installation view Dario Robleto, American Seabed, 2014. Fossilized prehistoric whale ear bones salvaged from the sea (1to 10 million years), various butterflies, butterfly antennae made from stretched and pulled audiotape recordings of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” concrete, ocean water, pigments, coral, brass, steel, Plexiglas. 37 x 68 x 55 inches

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Dario Robleto, Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens [detail], 2012. Digital inkjet print mounted on Sintra, a collection of stage lights taken from the album covers of live performances of nowdeceased Gospel, Blues and Jazz musicians. Images courtesy of the artist. Triptych: 31 x 31; 46 x 46; 31 x 31 inches Images courtesy of the artist.

Rising to the Questions of the Cosmos: Ann Druyan, Dario Robleto & Jennifer Roberts in conversation