The week before Thanksgiving, American photographer Trevor Paglen traveled to Kazakhstan carrying a package of photographs.
That wasn't unusual, given that Paglen is a professional photographer and often travels around the world to exhibit his work. What was unusual was the package he carried: a gold-plated disc, with the photos micro-etched onto a silicon wafer inside.
Even more unusual was where the photos were going – into space, by hitching a ride on the side of an EchoStar satellite atop a Russian Proton rocket that was launched into orbit Nov. 20, where it will remain as a record of humans' activity on earth for billions of years.
Titled The Last Pictures, the project is a joint venture between Paglen and Creative Time, a New York-based public arts nonprofit, to document the impact human beings have had on the earth's surface for whoever comes after us, millions or even billions of years in the future.
For Paglen, who earned a Ph.D. in geography from U.C. Berkeley, the project would become a five-year-long odyssey during which he sifted through thousands of photos and spent a year as an artist-in-residence at MIT, where he worked with materials scientists to figure out how to design a container that would keep the photos intact for millions of years.
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