The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft share a single gesture: both ask what it means to be human when no one is watching.

The Preamble begins with the recognition of human dignity , that worth is not granted by governments or gods but is inherent in each person. This was a radical claim in 1948, born from the ruins of war. It proposed that law should not serve power but protect humanity from it. By grounding rights in dignity, the Preamble turned ethics into structure: the rule of law as a safeguard against chaos. Its final promise , “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations” , imagines a world community bound not by territory but by respect.

Decades later, the Golden Record translated that same vision into art. The Record, launched aboard Voyager in 1977, is a phonographic message containing sounds, images, and music from Earth , a portrait of our world intended for any intelligence that might one day encounter it. It is not a mirror of who we are but an edited self-portrait of who we wish to be. The Record omits our violence and fear; it sends music, greetings, and laughter , fragments of peace. It is a deliberate act of ethical curation, a portrait of humanity as if we had already achieved the unity and justice the Preamble envisions. It proposes that imagination itself can be an ethical act , that by shaping how we represent ourselves, we reshape what we may become.

This work draws its conceptual and visual language from The Book of Fixed Stars, an Arabic manuscript written by the Persian astronomer ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī around 964 CE. From it, I draw the constellation Serpens, the celestial serpent that recalls the creatures on medieval maps , symbols of fear and wonder marking the edges of the known world. In this piece, Serpens links those mythic boundaries of imagination to the path of Voyager and its Golden Record, a modern map of human aspiration launched into deep space. Both gestures , the ancient act of naming the stars and the modern act of sending our likeness among them , express the same human drive: to turn mystery into relation, to give form to the unknown, and to imagine connection where none yet exists.

The Voyager spacecraft gives this gesture physical form. Its small, golden disc travels beyond the influence of the Sun, carrying our sounds, images, and hopes. It is both relic and messenger , a constellation in motion , tracing our enduring desire to transform the unknown into connection, to leave a trace, and to imagine ourselves already at home in the vastness we seek to comprehend.