Artist Trevor Paglen doesn't need to worry about his book, The Last Pictures, disappearing. The collection of 100 seminal photographs is due to be launched into space next month, where it is intended to remain in the Earth's orbit for billions of years.
Paglen spent four years interviewing scientists, anthropologists, philosophers and artists to make his selection of 100 images representing modern human history – "cave paintings from the 21st century", as he puts it. The book, The Last Pictures, is being published next month, and the images will also be etched on to a silicon disc encased in a gold-plated shell, which will be sent into space fixed to the outside of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI, when it takes off from Kazakhstan in September.
The book's co-publishers, Creative Time Books, called the project "both a message to the future and a poetic meditation on the legacy of our civilisation", and said the initiative was "rooted in the premise that these communications satellites will ultimately become the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, far outlasting anything else humans have created".
The project was partially inspired by Carl Sagan's Golden Record, which went into space on board Voyager in the 1970s. As well as being a "cosmic message in a bottle", Paglen hopes it will "serve as a stark reminder of humanity's fragility and as a meditation on our ultimate fate".
"As human beings we're used to thinking about time in terms of hours or years. The Last Pictures asks: how we do think about a deeper time beyond the human?" said Joao Ribas, curator of MIT's List Visual Arts Centre, where Paglen completed a residency.
"Trevor has created an artwork that will likely be a part of our skyscape for billions of years – even longer than multi-celled organisms have been on Earth. It is a timescale so vast, it is difficult for us to comprehend," said Anne Pasternak, president of Creative Time, which is co-publishing the book of pictures with the University of California Press.
Paglen, who will be doing a series of talks about the project, is the author of non-fiction books including I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. His work has been shown around the world.
