In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, each of which carried a phonograph record titled The Golden Record. The Record was meant to provide a glimpse of life on Earth through sounds and images. The Committee was led by Carl Sagan, the project’s Executive Director, and included Frank Drake (Technical Director), Ann Druyan (Creative Director), Timothy Ferris (Producer), Jon Lomberg (Designer), and Linda Salzman (Greetings Organizer). It was intended as a message in a bottle to extraterrestrials.
For a variety of reasons—including a prohibition against explicit content, fears of the Record being taken as a sign of aggression, legal and financial restrictions, and the myriad other reasons that one might surmise that a small, limited, insular committee of people would be rather limited in their experiences as well as selective about how they chose to portray humanity—the Record excluded a great deal regarding Earth and its inhabitants.
This manuscript imagines that, in 2020, NASA formed another Committee tasked with compiling the Record’s B-Sides, which were to be released as a separate album and meant to capture as much as possible of what the original Record elided, which the new Committee was invited to define however it wished based on its members’ lived experiences. This Committee was much larger and worked in anonymity, sharing their recommendations via messaging platforms and cloud storage systems. Each was known by their screen name, which was a randomly generated nonhuman like Sparrow or Elm. One person was designated with the role of filtering through the broader Committee’s recommendations and compiling them into a singular artifact. This person was also responsible for giving to The B-Sides a tone of intimacy and ensuring that, despite its outward investment in minoritarian and contrarian viewpoints, the B-Sides also remained “in compliance” with agency directives. That person is the speaker of the book’s primary sequences.
The project explores the tyranny of the “royal we” in contrast with the pleasure of a hard-won solidarity-based collectivity, the paradoxes of working for revolutionary outcomes within late-capitalist structures, the many valences of the word “alien,” and the task of imagining a de-colonial world, among other topics. Some of the poems from this project have been published, although some of these have shifted significantly between these versions and the book versions. Those poems are listed on this page; for more complete citational information, see Words Online. This book is not yet seeking a publisher, but it will be in a couple years! Wink, nudge, etc.
From the title sequence:
“Track One: ‘The Canary Flies Toward the Mine’” (in a now out-of-circulation journal; stay tuned for a PDF version coming soon)
“Track Two: ‘Sounds of Human Labor’”
“Track Three: ‘Some Flowers That Have Died’”
“Track Five: ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”
“Track Six: ‘The Interrogative Mood’”
“Track Seven, ‘Love Poem with Prosopopoeia’”
“Track Eight: ‘Alienation of Affection’”
“Track Eleven, ‘How Will You Begin?’”
“Track Twenty-One: ‘Ozymandias’”
From a sequence of visual poems: