STUDIO #2 : Where Satellites are born

The birthplace of Satellites for 30 years – well hidden in the middle of Berlin.

In the institute’s workshop, satellite missions are designed, tested & built – which are then sent into space via spaceports in Baikonur, Cape Caneveral or Kourou.
In the past, they measured the ice over the Arctic – today, they are being used to research how to collect the rapidly growing space junk around our planet.

The satellite overflights are managed and evaluated at the in-house Mission Control Center.
Therefore, the GOLDEN RECORD STUDIOS set up their research base exactly here: In the laboratories & training rooms of the «Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics» of the Technical University of Berlin.

More than 40 years ago, a handful of US-Americans decided what would travel through space on NASA’s Golden Records for the next 500 million years – now it’s the students & teachers of this satellite lab from all over the world who, together with our guests & experts, are producing their own record.

Space exploration used to be the most prestigious display of technological prowess of Super Powers – now it has become a shiny toy for the super rich. With visions of space tourism & an extraterrestrial race to new frontiers. Based on sci-fi phantasies from the 1950s & the colonialist desire of the 17th century.

In this laboratory of super advanced human engineering, this assembly turns the telescope around and takes aliens on earth into focus: From the dystopian images of monstrous extraction in the Amazon to the globe-spanning soft power of the Gaia hypothesis. With greetings from the 80s from Red Square to West Germany.

Topics of this ASSEMBLY:

• Extraction in the Amazon with Images of Aliens
• We, the Symbiont: Raving against the Machine
• A Message from Moscow’s Red Square

Inputs by:

Eric Macedo – Research Fellow at the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry, Berkeley. Social Anthropology in the Amazon, Sci-Fi & Decolonialism

Salome Rodeck – Cultural Studies, Symbiont Theory of Lynn Margulis & Donna Haraway

Hendrik Jackson – Poet, essayist and translator, especially from Russian. Editor of the Internet portal www.lyrikkritik.de, founder of the «Academy for Poetry Criticism“.

Musician of this Recording Session: Schneider TM – Electronic Pop & experimental Freeform Music, Innovator of Indietronic