My memorial is situated in a world in which human-driven ecological collapse has pushed the remaining humans on Earth off the planet to seek intergalactic refuge. It is unclear if they will ever be able to return. The wealthy left first on luxury ships advertised to provide their elite clientele with endless comfort and luxury in the cosmos. For the Earthly proletariat, the journey into space was more grim: endless bunks suited with screens on three sides, and enough benzodiazepines to ensure that life was just livable enough. The entertainment that once provided an escape from Earthly life and work became life and work in space.
With no one left on the planet, the final reminder that humans once played out their dramatic lives—were born, fell in love, killed each other, made peace, and died, all on one planet—is a projection of all the media that humans made onto the moon. The projection itself is a grid that picks randomly from a library of all video media ever created by humans, as well as from thousands of live feed cameras recording the surface of Earth. It shows these random feeds as a massive collection, creating new visual metaphors as it plays them concurrently. Ultimately, it presents a final breakdown of human signals and signifiers into an overwhelming sludge of audio and video. The piece itself would disintegrate over time, as the hardware that makes it all possible degrades. This would become a part of the work, as another show of the ephemeral quality of the human experience. The feed would never look the same in two different moments, but ultimately the images (if seen from a distance, where they could be made out), would always overwhelm the viewer.
Of course, there would no longer be people on Earth to observe this final Earthly spectacle. But even from Earth, though they could hear the cacophony of sound, the composite image would appear like a stained glass window, abstracted colors that would awash the Earth in a soft glow on nights with full moons.
The viewer could not discern a unitary meaning in the memorial. To some, it could be seen as a warning of what happens to a planet when appearances begin to outweigh the real. The climate catastrophe that drove the people off the planet could have been avoided if real action could have been substituted for comforting veneers of such. To others, it could be seen as a moment in which all human history converges, and is instantly remembered, resituated, and forgotten in the greater context of the other media playing along beside it. The memorial is exemplary of what humans desire most: to be heard, to be seen, and maybe—if just for a moment—to be famous.
