When not working on this website many of the Tenspeed Heroes work as artists and designers. Last week we were lucky to install an exhibition concerning the Voyager Spacecraft’s Golden Record at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. For the last year and a half Neil Donnelly, Mary Voorhees Meehan, Judd Greenstein, Jonathan Sadler and Luke Batten put their minds to re-imagining the golden record via a spaceship that could capture the utopia that roused Carl Sagan and his collaborators in 1977 to communicate with alien life with pictures, messages and sounds of earth.
Entitled, This is a Present From a Small Distant World, our spaceship was constructed of two 12-foot high walls made of plywood, lumber, paint and vinyl. Though we filled our ship with newspaper interviews, light-boxes, slide shows, and music we left room on the newspapers and walls for visitors to add their own contributions to this new record. On the outer walls Neil Donnelly and Mary Voorhees Meehan created an alphabetical listing of the original contents of the first Golden Record. Its scale was as lofty and emotional as the contents. Opening night festivities were celebrated with three live performances by Violist, Nadia Sirota, performing a new composition created for the installation by Judd Greenstein, In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves.
It is hard to let a project like this go and to realize it has been completed because for the last 16 months it has been at the top of our daily list as the prime directive. We often find when a work of art is completed there is a pain in your stomach that strangely can never be satiated. It takes time to recover. Nevertheless, it will be up until October 7th so if you are in Scottsdale, Arizona please stop by.
And lest we forget, we would like to extend our thanks to our families, friends and studio assistants for taking on this beautiful task with us.
