Atrium Gallery

Eurydice: Decoded

Rebecca West

What's   real?

Fact and Fiction  in  Eurydice: Decoded 
Eurydice:   Decoded blends storytelling with facts in order to create an immersive experience. In keeping with the Living Arts and science center's educational mission, this guide clarifies what parts of the show are fictional, and which are based in fact.

It is recommended to first experience the exhibit and to read this guide afterwards if you have questions or if you have young children and want to help them understand what parts of the show are true and which are storytelling.

Fictional  Elements

The Horizons Institute is a fictional organization. 

The Eurydice Object and all data and images retrieved from it are fictional.

If intelligent life exists on other worlds, there is still no guarantee that life exists at the same time as us, or is reachable. Similarly, the objects and transmissions humanity has sent into the stars may be found in the far future, long after life has ceased to exist on earth. Thinking about this made me want to create Eurydice. 

Images decoded from Eurydice are fictional, and created by me. through a process of model making, finding and posing objects, photographing dioramas, and small amounts of digital editing. 

Video was created with similar diorama processes and time lapse photography. Data corruption processes were used to create the glitched version presented as "recovered" from the Eurydice object.

Illustrations interpreting the data are also created by me.

Glyphs are logograms designed by me. 

Objects "from the impact site" are found objects originating on earth.

what's  real?   (continued)

Facts

The Many   sizes of Stars,     The   Many  colors of Stars,  The colors of Astronomy,         where in Space would You       Like to visit?       and                science            Fiction and     NASA, are educational material owned by the Living Arts and Science Center, which they graciously allowed me to incorporate into the exhibit. All information in them is factual. 

Voyager and the Golden Record are real. The timeline of its trip to the next closest star system is accurate. 

Travel times presented in the Speed of Light infoblock are also accurate, to the best of my knowledge. 

The Stelliferous Era is a term from the book The Five Ages of the Universe by Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin, which proposes a timeline for an expanding universe based on current astrophysics. 

Lunar mares are real formations on the moon, and you really can see the largest ones from Earth, they form the "face" of the moon!

Mare Moscoviense is a real location on the far side of the moon. (However there is no impact crater containing an alien artifact there.) 

Chemosynthesis is real! Life at the very bottom of the ocean cannot use sunlight as the building blocks of their food chain. Instead, at volcanic vents, extremophile bacteria survive on heat and chemical energy. In turn, larger life feeds on these bacteria, creating fascinating and fragile ecosystems. 

Obapinia is a real prehistoric organism. 

Cueva de los Manos is a real location where prehistoric people came to make handprint art that has survived into modern times.      I often wonder who they were and what they thought about when leaving those handprints.