In 1977, NASA sent two identical spacecraft on a tour of the solar system’s outer planets, and afterwards, the vessels proceeded to the further reaches of interstellar space. They were the Voyager 1 and 2 probes. Besides the missions and the multitude of equipment, both spacecraft carried something unique: each had a gold-coded disc containing what can be understood as a galactic greeting card. They were meant to be read a long time from now, by extraterrestrials. The idea behind these discs is the result of a seemingly simple, but in reality, very profound question: how could we talk to aliens? What form of common language could be created in order to communicate with these unknown creatures? How would we go about it? 

To solve this challenge, scientists made a golden LP record, with sounds, songs, and greetings in many languages of Earth. But within the soundwaves of the record, they encoded actual images from our planet! And on the other side of the disc, they included the decoding method for the aliens to follow and experience all of the greetings contained within it. These golden disks offered coded information and a cipher to help these aliens understand it all. We encoded a story, a great narration.

We humans create symbolic meaning in many different things, ideas, and objects. Through coded symbols, we create languages, slang, and stories told from generation to generation. We devise societal structures and rules, codes of conduct, and even systemize machines to work with these codes, like our computers. But codes appear in so many other ways! If we look at ourselves, and any living thing for that matter, we also see code in the form of genes. Each of us is a long story of C’s, G’s, T’s, and A’s, and all earthly living things are part of a long, long saga of code, going back to the first living microorganisms that used DNA (and even RNA). 

In nature, we can notice the way so many different living things use coded communication, like the octopus’s capacity for communication via their skin, the mycelium underground network that connects trees and plants, the mating dances of birds of paradise and peacock spiders, and even how so many species use coded scents to communicate. Codes today, are used both to secure information as well as transmit it in a variety of methods.

In this new exhibit, the MuseOn seeks to engage the visitor in deciphering not only the many, many ways code has been a key form of our culture, expression, knowledge, and communication, but also how we use the framework of code to describe and categorize the world around us. The exhibit will engage the visitors with provocations like “How have stories shaped our social codes?”, “Will excessive codes confuse us and make us lose meaning?”, “Is code a way to understand life all around us?”, “What controls the code narrative, and why?”, and provoke the visitor to think about why we create ever-evolving codes and ways to communicate the same ideas.

In the end, we hope to foster the notion that we are all code. We, and everything else, are all stories. And like the Voyager probes, we use ‘golden disks’ of our own to further our knowledge, not only for ourselves but for future generations.

​This text was made without the use of AI.