The Golden Record @ Collective Gallery

Fuelled by ambition of gargantuan proportions and driven with an intent in line with the joviality and ingenuity to which we have become so accustomed during August, this year's Art Festival sees Collective firmly propel The Golden Record – Sounds of Earth onto our exhibition to-do-list. Remaking a phonograph projected into the great beyond by NASA in 1977, The Golden Record is a veritable Wikipedia of visual, acoustic and conceptual offerings. The original record, launched on the Voyager spacecraft, held 116 images and various insightful sound recordings of weather, animals, music and spoken languages, complete with written greetings from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. While the original sought to represent the complexity of the human race to any curious extra-terrestrial life form that may stumble upon it, the Collective Gallery’s reinterpretation - curated by Mel Brimfield in association with Pleasance Theatre, Go Faster Stripe and Battersea Arts Centre – seeks to present an account of humanity to any festival goer who may, quite understandably, have momentarily forgotten what it is.

Straddling the Art and Fringe Festivals, the project will see 15 comedians battling it out at the Pleasance to win the honour of representing mankind, with Stewart Lee and If.comedy’s Best Newcomer of 2006, Josie Long, among the contenders. Meanwhile, on site at Collective a range of short video works will be among the many didactic creations that have been commissioned to explain such intricate and multifaceted topics as ‘Sainsbury’s’ and ‘Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle’. In addition, the original 2-D images found on the Voyager have been re-imagined in guises no doubt a tad more liberal than the initial collection (the inclusion of a photograph of a nude man and woman being deemed too risqué back in 1977). Covering vast topics with great specificity, anyone slightly unsure of the exact particulars of homemade love songs, ventriloquism or egg cups could do worse than paying Collective a visit next month.

Considering the estimated 40,000 years it will take the Voyager spacecraft to come into contact with another star, it’s marginally doubtful that NASA’s Golden Record will ever reach its intended audience, to fulfil its initial purpose as a “present from a small, distant world”. Collective’s re-make however, is one gift which will most certainly make it.