Message to the Extraterrestials

2007 - Installation (Installation)

Message to the Extraterrestrials consists of a slide projector beaming images into the side of the telescope. These are then reflected down to a mirror at the bottom of the telescope and from there to a mirror on the ceiling. From the ceiling the images bounce down to a mirror at floor level which projects the images through an open window to the world outside. The function of the telescope has been inverted and transformed from a receiver to a broadcaster of light. The images it projects are selected from the ‘Golden Record’ produced for the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions. These were intended to inform any extraterrestrials of life and culture on earth. Described by Ann Druyan, author and science media producer, as ‘a classic message in a bottle’ there was never any knowing whether, if viewed by an extraterrestrial, they would be able to decode the visual signals or not. The projection of these images by the Voyager spacecraft was at once an informative and a futile gesture. Ed Stone, Voyager’s project scientist, stated that “In a sense it is a unifying message. It’s a message from Earth. It contains greetings in many languages, music from many cultures and images that portray our home planet.”

Christoph Keller’s works function between science and art and have a practical as well as an aesthetic application. They are interventions into reality as well as inventions. Keller is fascinated by previous scientific undertakings such as Wilhelm Reich’s Cloudbuster project that Keller re-enacted from the roof of PS1 in an attempt to make rain over New York in the Spring and Summer of 2003 using orgone and nuclear energy. Keller’s stance is at once social political and artistic. He is engaged in debates around existence and the human condition. His project Helioflex is an attempt, using mirrors, to ‘bypass the social gradient of access to sunlight in urban habitations’, in other words to bring sunlight to areas normally in shadow at an affordable price. According to Keller the density of building generates a social gradient of sunlight in urban areas. The top floors bathe in light that is missing in the bottom floors. The device bypasses this gradient and creates a connection to the outside world by reflecting natural light to spaces that have never seen the sun before.’ Keller’s political engagement is in the tradition of Josef Beuys, who taught at the Free University in Berlin where Keller began to study physics in 1988. Christoph Keller is a German artist who studied math, physics and hydrology before studying liberal arts in Berlin. Christoph Keller was born in Fribourg, Germany, in 1967. He lives and works in Berlin.