eds. Kate Genevieve, Jessica Hurley, Juan Francisco Salazar

An anthology marking fifty years since the launch of NASA’s Voyager mission and the Golden Record, inviting outer space studies and artistic contributions to grow just, plural futures for the second space age. This volume takes the Voyager Golden Record as a catalyst for creatively rethinking planetary futures. Bringing together artists with historians of science, STS scholars, ethnographers and community practitioners engaged with outer space, the book combines critique with reparative and imaginative work. 

In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager probes on their journey into deep space. Attached to them, two engraved Golden Records promised to communicate humanity to other worlds and other minds. Fifty years on, we invite responses to the Voyager and the Golden Record that engage with the Voyager's aspiration for interstellar futures, complicate its dreams of a planetary humanity, and take the Record itself as a launch pad for alternative ways of imagining deep spacetimes and human/more-than-human communication with(in) the cosmos. As the only human-made objects to cross the heliosphere, the Voyager now occupies a liminal region of interstellar space that reframes Earth’s material entanglement with the cosmos.

As Voyager moves beyond radio reach, its communication is nearing an end: we read this as a landmark moment to reflect on what can be learned from its improbable, interdisciplinary collaboration, sustained through profound technical and organisational uncertainties, at a time when the very notion of transnational collaboration is under attack.

Across a multidisciplinary field of contributions, the Record is simultaneously theorized as a situated Cold War artefact shaped by conflicts, exclusions and uneven power relations, and also a cybernetic experiment in cooperation that imaginatively stretches the frame of science and expands the kinds of questions that we can ask for more-than-terran futures. 

Contributions will examine the unexplored historical legacies of the Golden Record, with attention to these legacies' gaps, mysteries and contested materials; offer situated and ethnographic accounts  of the Record in relation to communities and recordings that came to be included, misused or left out; and compile creative and artistic responses that refigure, contest or re‑compose the Golden Record. A particular emphasis falls on Indigenous, Pacific, and oceanic perspectives on a communicative cosmos, alternative universalities, and artistic and musical approaches to space-time in the emerging second space age.

The collection’s vision is to work with the Golden Record as a cultural artefact and cybernetic object that connects past to the present: wandering, persisting, voyaging. The Golden Record as creative tool for thinking plural futures and a prompt for pluriversal futures work on the planetary and outer space. By reading the Record’s hopeful aspirations together with its unresolved problems, and by inviting creative as well as scholarly responses, the book seeks to unearth the “dark matter” of the Record and to explore messages, protocols and shared imaginaries for communicative futures, using creative fictions to introduce to the record perspectives that were marginal to the original project.

We invite contributions that creatively play with form, practice, and protocol, including work that might not align with the norms of scholarly writing and publishing. This anthology is an invitation to joyful and defiant writing: to welcome your particular entanglements, lineages, and companions into the conversation, and to release the narrowings of style that often accompany formal writing. We welcome contributions that experiment with form and voice in relation to the Golden Record as an experimental and cybernetic artefact and a piece of media art in its own right.

We invite essays of up to 5,000 words: written work that takes the Golden Record itself as a point of departure and enters into dialogue with it. While 5,000 words is our starting guideline, poets and artists may prefer to submit shorter pieces, and some academic researchers may want to write slightly longer essays: we can be flexible on what best serves your contribution. Abstracts are due by July 31, 2026 and final submissions will be due by December 17, 2026. We are working towards publication in Routledge's Space Humanities series.

Prompts to think with for this project might include, but are not limited to:

• Journeying, voyaging, enduring in the cosmic ocean: pilgrimage as a way of knowing in motion. Can we read the Record as a cybernetic experiment in journeys without destination, open-ended communication and non‑linear time?

• Creative practices that work with the Record’s cosmic questions, openings and ruptures via remixing and recomposing, practices of listening and archival reuse, and plural and more‑than‑human approaches.

• Music, sound, visual and media art that refigures the Golden Record, its teleologies, and its imaginaries of space-time in relation to the hopeful futures of cooperation and communication that the Record performs.

• Perspectives from beyond the Anglosphere: music, language and ways of knowing from regions less represented in discourse about outer space, NASA, the Voyager mission and its Golden Record. For example, Voyaging as a living tradition across the great Ocean, but the Pacific is poorly represented. How might the voyaging traditions, navigation, oceanic and archipelagic epistemologies, and lingua franca worlds reframe the Golden Record? For example, Polynesian and Micronesian space imaginaries; bislama, the national language of Vanuatu, as lingua franca across difference.

• Works that universalise from somewhere else: Pacific, oceanic, Indigenous or alternative cosmologies of time, matter and relational universals.

• The Record as a utopian proposition, but also a Cold War, US‑centred artefact, embroiled in narratives around NASA and national priorities.

• Historical investigation of what is and is not on the Record, and theorization of what the gaps and exclusions communicate; contexts for inclusion and analysis of extractive inclusion practices.

• Specific stories behind individual tracks or media on the Record that illuminate neglected cultural legacies; the Golden Record as composing space cultures, as well as a composition of many worlds.

• Art that critiques the Record and its politics of representation: generating counter-messages, alternative records, impossible transmissions and related experiments in meaning-making across species.

• Jokes, prophecies, philosophies, punk, and other counter-cultural invocations of the Golden Record.

• Art-making processes, collage, re-mix and the Golden Record: artistic and practice-based responses that extend, refigure, or re-compose the Golden Record through film, sound/music, performance, visual art, speculative fiction, sonification, brainwave or signal works. Writing on material practices, making-and-doing, and collaboration, that opens to more than critical treatments, with room for the feeling-full, embodied and intimate creative work refiguring our place in the Universe, and opening to the transformative and liberatory power of art.

• Voicing the planetary "we": who has the right to speak for the planet? Perspectives from queer feminism, Indigenous practice approaches, Afrofuturism? Fresh forms and moves in planetary address: what new listening or space imaginaries emerge through dialogue with the Golden Record?

• Space imaginaries: How do artists engage with space imaginaries and xeno-imaginaries of life beyond earth? 

• The Record as a collection, a mixtape, a quilt - combinatorial and divergent - working with fragments and the unfinished to gesture beyond representation. Creative techniques of remixing, collage, anthology. How can creative practice intervene with techniques of process, poetics, music and performance that refuse homogeneity or flattening? 

• Unprecedented encounters and shared worlds; finding new modes of engaging with justice, ethics, welcome, care and communication itself.

• The Record as a cybernetic catalyst for more-than-human thinking: the Golden Record employs the environment itself as a communication protocol (for example, the composition of hydrogen is positioned as a universal communicator of distance); Theoretical humanities: how does the Record illuminate theories of planetary futures, interspecies translation and non‑linear, cosmological, ecological space-times. 

• Material Distances: the Record as the furthest material artefact of Earth, beyond territorial jurisdiction and the sun’s domain of influence (or at least, beyond the heliosphere) reimagining questions of sovereignty, scale, sensory reach across distance and creative technics.

• Media archaeologies and creative practice: memory, the living archive, interplanetary memory and creative objects as time machines.

• Communication beyond control: The Record (currently) can not be recalled, cancelled or destroyed from earth; thinking on precarious and immutable messaging.

• Creative approaches to communication across radical borders and boundaries; refiguring communication and media networks and ideas of ownership, copyright, sovereignty and the space commons. The Golden Record as one episode within longer histories of scientific collaboration, universalism, and treaty-making, engaging questions of cooperation, protocol, culture and data practices.

• Imaginative and courageous approaches for friendly and mutual futures: expressions of planetary communication and networks, post-detection protocols and space aspirations amid fractured geopolitics and a high-stakes race to lunar habitation and Mars missions, off-Earth infrastructures and unprecedented events, war, dispossession and continuity of colonial extraction and exclusion.

• Convivial futures in the Second Space Age? The Golden Record as a portal into tomorrow, invoking friendship across time and space; The intimate, relational offer of mix‑tape or compilation as a mode of growing relations and sustaining worlds.