Selected work · Founding team · Lead curator and brand strategist
Building Earth Archive: Contexts, Origins, and Narratives
An independent global initiative designed to share the knowledge, experiences, and aspirations of humankind across space and time.
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The project
A message from Earth, for the long now.
BEACON (Building Earth Archive: Contexts, Origins, and Narratives) is an independent global initiative designed to share the knowledge, experiences, and aspirations of humankind across space and time.
Our goal is to assemble grounded portrayals of life on Earth, curated with scientific and scholarly rigor, to accompany deep space missions. Through multimedia expressions, these records will bridge ecological and social narratives to reflect the complexity of our changing world.
BEACON carries forward the optimism and curiosity that shaped the Voyager Golden Records in 1977, reimagining them for the 21st century with an expanded commitment to planetary representation, cultural reflection, and interdisciplinary collaboration. We are honored to carry this effort forward with the blessing of the original members of the Golden Records team.
My role
Part of the executive and founding team. Lead curator and brand strategist.
I help shape what BEACON says and how it looks, sounds and feels: the curation of the Golden Record's successor, the story around it, and the identity that carries it to the world.
Our story
It began in 2021.
The concept for BEACON emerged in 2021, when astrophysicist and atmospheric scientist Dr. Jonathan H. Jiang, together with his former colleagues at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), recognized in the Interstellar Probe mission concept and proposal an opportunity to initiate the development of a new, contemporary successor to the Voyager Golden Records.
Our mission
New messages of goodwill, from Earth to the cosmos.
Expanding upon the Voyager Golden Records, BEACON seeks to create new messages of goodwill from Earth to the cosmos, conveying the complex and multifaceted realities of our contemporary era through visual and sonic materials that reflect humanity's relationship with our planet.
Instead of capturing a comprehensive history of Earth, this initiative is anchored in humanity's most aspirational qualities that speak to our present and shared future. Our mission is organized around three objectives:
01
Interstellar Messages
We create cultural archives to accompany future deep space missions, sharing knowledge and experiences of humankind with whoever may one day encounter them.
02
Time Capsules
We develop copies of the archives to be stored on Earth, preserving a record of the cultures, perspectives, and conditions of the current world as a time capsule for posterity.
03
Global Cooperation
We foster global cooperation, encouraging reflection on shared human experiences to shape a collective voice. We also seek to engage the broader public through educational programs and selective open calls.
Visual and sonic modalities
Seeing and hearing, as universals.
In the first installment of our research, we introduced the workflow of the anticipated BEACON mission, outlining two modalities for encoded content, as well as the types of content suitable for an interstellar message: materials that could most likely bridge interpretability in Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) communications and maintain intelligibility over time.
Our proposal of visual and sonic content modalities draws upon existing hypotheses on interstellar communication, informed by NASA research in 2014, which outlines communication methods based on physical universals. Given the independent evolution of both vision and hearing across a multitude of Earthly species, the scientific assumption is that extraterrestrial species may also possess inherent abilities to sense and process stimuli from electromagnetic (EM) waves and/or oscillations in pressure, corresponding with the ability to see and hear, albeit at different wavelengths and frequencies.
“The convergent traits of seeing and hearing may serve as proxies for probable universal features of communication that traverse the limits of our own biological frame of reference.”
Jiang, et al., 2023
Content tiers
Two tiers, for different levels of sophistication.
The interstellar message is designed with two tiers of content, accommodating extraterrestrials with different levels of sophistication.
Tier 1
Simple illustrations
Comprises simple illustrations of fundamental concepts about humanity and our environment. The content here would be accessible without advanced technology.
Tier 2
Digitized images and sounds
Includes digitized information (images and sounds) with more complexity about life on Earth, intended to be perceived by an advanced civilization.
Work with me
Have a story that needs to travel far?
I bring the same curation, strategy and creative direction to brands, institutions and individuals. Born at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, BEACON is one of the stories I get to help tell.
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