unfinished masterpieces

"I think sometimes of the Voyager Golden Records, spinning endlessly into eternity, a cry into the void that features a selection of carefully curated human experiences in an attempt to communicate the vastness of Earth’s history and culture to other beings. The offerings, selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan, include a photograph of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of footsteps, a sampling from The Magic Flute, an image of an astronaut in space, a human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve information. "