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April 1, 2025 | Uncategorized,
Our next show is being SENT TO THE MOON (literally)
Utopian Hotline, a stunning collaboration between Theater Mitu, Museum of Science, and ArtsEmerson, is inspired by the Voyager Golden Record, a time capsule containing the sounds and images of Earth which was launched into space in 1977. While the contents of the Golden Record were intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may discover it, the record’s content continues to fascinate humans back on earth, as the meaning of the mission and its contents grow and change as the decades march on.
Of the Golden Record’s influence on Utopian Hotline, Theater Mitu explains, “After traveling over 13 billion miles, this proverbial message in a bottle [on the Golden Record] is the farthest human-made object from earth. If we were to send another message into the distant future, what message would we send?”
“We discovered a way to reach out to people,” Director Rubén Polendo told an interviewer in 2021, “by creating a simple telephone number and putting up flyers around our local neighborhoods to collect voicemails. To our surprise, people called. They called and poured their hearts and minds out onto the recordings. They filled the airwaves with their hopes and worries and jokes and dreams—so many dreams of a more perfect future.”
Go ahead, call the number, we dare you! They are still accepting new voicemails.
Using real voicemails, experimental, original music, and spectacular visuals projected onto the Museum of Science’s Planetarium, the show creates a one-of-a-kind experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen on stage or in a Planetarium. Utopian Hotline is a new vision for the future—our future.
But now, in a true “life imitates art”—moment for the ages (or is it “art imitates life”?), Utopian Hotline itself is now being sent into space. Yes, we’re serious.
“Selected for NASA’s Lunar Codex Project, [Utopian Hotline is the first performance-based artwork bound for the Moon, encrypted on a gold disc and attached to a lunar probe, along with a curated number of contemporary art works. This project exemplifies Theater Mitu’s commitment to bridging art, technology, and science.” (NYU Tisch News)
Rubén Polendo, right, and Justin Nestor at MITU580 in Brooklyn. The performance space is Theater Mitu’s home for a vibrant community of innovative theatre makers.
So, what is the Lunar Codex, exactly? The New York Times covered the project in July of 2023, explaining, “The Lunar Codex is a digitized (or miniaturized) collection of contemporary art, poetry, magazines, music, film, podcasts and books by 30,000 artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers in 157 countries. It’s the brainchild of Samuel Peralta, a semiretired physicist and author in Canada with a love of the arts and sciences. The concept is ‘like the Golden Record,’ Peralta said, referring to NASA’s own cultural time capsule of audio and images stored on a metal disc and sent into space aboard the Voyager probes in 1977.”
It all circles back to the Golden Record!
MAY 01—18 @ The Museum of Science
GO DEEPER (INTO SPACE)
Want to pretend you’re an alien life form finding and hearing the contents of the Voyager Golden Record? Listen to these playlists below. Let us know your favorite tracks in the comment.
Field Recordings and Greetings placed on the Golden Record
https://soundcloud.com/nick-654095441/sets/voyager-golden-record
Music placed on the Golden Record
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4D51474AB7BE5595&si=qrOpr7qv5u-yxUJ7
President Jimmy Carter’s message included on the Golden Record below
Read The New Yorker’s story about the Golden Record was first conceived and assembled.
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