The Golden Record is a futuristic 'perfume organ' much like those used by early perfumers that had tiered levels to organize essential oils. Its scented blocks are components of an original perfume and are illuminated by a custom-programmed LED panel. The blocks light up in a pattern recalling the alien communication signals from the climax of Steven Spielberg's 1977 visionary movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The piece is being shown from March 3 - May 1, 2010 at
Smith Farm, an illness and cancer recovery center promoting wellness and healing in light of life's most difficult health challenges. The show has been curated by
Koan Jeff Baysa, writer, critic, curator and physician.
The shape of
The Golden Record also references PET scanning devices, now frequently used in cancer detection. Positron Emission Topography is an outgrowth of the same technology used in experimental physics. At one of the leading physics research institutions, CERN, on the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is already breaking apart matter to determine which particles were present at the dawn of the universe. My intention for this piece is to enable people to change their roles within and around medical technology from passive to active, and to rethink how the body communicates with bodies foreign to it, by using non-visual sensory perception to break down the Close Encounters perfume and identify its respective components. Spielberg's
Close Encounters is one of the friendly alien movies, with a huge cult following and perhaps a positive vision for people dealing with diseases like cancer, nothing short of a hostile takeover.
The background research for
The Golden Record and the Close Encounters perfume came from my interest in new astronomical findings: in April 2009, researchers at the Max Planck Institute detected scented molecules in inter-stellar dust clouds using radio telescopes. It was reported in
The Guardian that ethyl formate, which gives rum its smell and raspberries their flavor, was one of the organic compounds discovered in deep space. The molecule is a precursor to amino acid production and could be an indication that "life" begins at a chemical level from common galactic matter.
