in 1977, nasa launched a golden record into space as a time capsule. it contains sounds, images, and most importantly music to show extraterrestrial life what earth is like. ad astra - a voyage beyond sound was the kickoff of the 60th anniversary of the prins claus conservatorium. together with anet šilhavá and daan jonker we developed an interactive installation where visitors can combine different samples of pcc students into one.

we scrapped together a bunch of old music-listening-devices; cd players, cassette players, vinyl players. we hooked all of those up to one big old analogue 16-channel mixer. by loading in different samples and mixing them together the visitor could make their own golden record. with the press of a button the visitors could record their mix and take it with them by scanning a QR code.

each sample submitted by the pcc students also came with an image they sent with it. these images were displayed on 4 old crt tv's. this is also where instructions were shown and where the qr code was displayed.

it was quite a challenge getting all these dated and analogue devices working together and i had to come up with some creative solutions. since we could not have a bunch of one off vinyls made for this event, i installed an nfc reader onto the vinyl players and we put nfc stickers onto the vinyls themselves. this way the vinyls play as soon as they are put down rather than actually playing on the players.

 

as for the cassette and cd players, we had to figure out how we could tell the computer that's running the visuals which samples are playing. only then could it show the related image to that sample. in the end i added a unique set of beeps at the start of each sample. the computer would then hear these beeps and translate it back to a sample id, which is linked to the image.

 

this way we could still use the old equipment like we wanted but maintain the functionality we envisioned!