Dario Robleto: Between Art and Science

I first learned about NASA’s Golden Record in 2007 via Radiolab’s “Space” episode. As a math and science nerd turned artist, the story of Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan’s romance emerging from their joint work on the record left a major impression on me. Furthermore, that scientists were thinking and operating in such a humanist way when considering how to illustrate to potential extraterrestrial beings who we Earthlings are was a romantic notion in and of itself. Their approach made me reevaluate my assumptions about and lived experiences of the divide between the rational/analytic world of science and the emotional/intuitive world of art. 

With that history, I was immediately invested in Dario Robleto’s exhibition The Signal at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which features a film he created about the Golden Record. Though I revisited the Radiolab episode a few times in passing over the nearly two decades since it was first released, it had been probably ten years since I sought it out. Rather than re-listen to it as a refresher, I went to see the exhibition first. I beelined for the film at the back of the gallery and fortunately entered the space near the beginning of the 71-minute work. 

Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the third part of a trilogy of films by Robleto. I have not seen the other two works, but the artist assured me that they can stand alone. This is helpful, considering the only way to see the films is when they are exhibited; they do not exist (as so many things do these days) online. The mesmerizing video expands on the story that I had known of the Golden Record and Druyan’s process of curating it. Filled with various archival images and video clips, the piece sits somewhere between a documentary and an art film. 

Robleto told me about the video, “There is archival footage from NASA and various planetary missions, as well as footage from World War I, but also some of the earliest experiments in the 19th century attempting to photograph electricity, ghosts, and acoustic waves. But, I also love to confuse scale, and often, [seemingly] huge images of space are sourced from small biological/natural images. For example, there is a space scene made from the light illuminating a tiny spider web, and minuscule firing neurons made from images of comets and nebulae.”

This playful nature has been prevalent in Robleto’s work for decades. His art adopts a childlike curiosity and exploration of the big ideas and questions that we as a species have long been trying to approach or answer: Are we alone? How do we document our lives? What do we value? How might we pass our history forward into the future? What is love and how is it revealed? What does it mean to be human? Where does our consciousness live?

I found myself lost in Robleto’s video, my mind swirling and my heart beating excitedly as the stories he told unfolded. For a moment, I pulled myself out of it and wondered who the audience was for this work. I was entranced and time was cascading quickly before me, but would people interested in more traditional documentaries come to an art museum and sit for the film? Would museum visitors (who typically spend a few seconds in front of each work of art) dedicate over an hour to watch it? I looked around the darkened room and to my surprise realized that more than a dozen people had gathered and were equally entranced. On a Saturday afternoon in a small museum, people showed up and could not be torn from the space.

I felt and saw the success of the format, but still was curious to hear from the artist himself about his decision to straddle this line and potentially push the audience with the length of the film. He told me that Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the longest of the three films. Robleto explained, “When we think of avant-garde cinema, we rarely fold the one-hour PBS science show into that lineage, but it was in this format that I had my most formative experiences with video and film. One of the driving questions I formulated for myself was, ‘What if an artist directed an episode of Cosmos?’ That is not to imply the original wasn’t innovative (I am arguing that it was), but more about how to merge the needs of clear science communication with the more abstract and speculative space I am allowed as an artist.”

That speculative space that Robleto spoke of is exactly where the magic of his work exists. The gallery adjacent to the video room held works by the artist spanning from 2012 to 2018. One of the most powerful was a triptych of digital inkjet prints that seemed like photos of the cosmos. However, Survival Does Not Lie in the Heavens holds a secret — just like the space scene created from light reflecting off a spider’s web, the wall text notes that the objects masquerading as stars in this work are actually a combination of images of “stage lights taken from album covers of live performances of now-deceased Gospel, Blues, and Jazz musicians.” 

The work is beautifully deceptive. It calls to mind the lights in the night sky that exist forever away, some of which may not even remain because it has taken so long for their light to reach us that the star may be long gone. But it reveals that the same is true of these musicians: their star no longer burns, but hints of their existence continue to echo out into our world. 

And that is exactly what the Golden Record is an attempt to do. To send a message that will hopefully outlive our Earth and reach beings out in a space and future that we cannot imagine, to share the story of who we have been. The Golden Record also had a secret that had not fully been revealed until Robleto’s video. Over more than a decade, he has built a friendship with Druyan, and she opened up to him about the things she snuck onto the record via the recordings of her brain waves, heartbeat, and eye and muscle movements. During the hour that she was to think about important elements of earthly history such as plate tectonics, the Cambrian Explosion, the invention of agriculture and flight, and many other things, Druyan deviated from the plan. She thought of war, poverty, destruction, sexism, bigotry, and other “uncomfortable truths,” as Robleto calls them.

In my conversation with Robleto, I was eager to get to the heart of how he came to learn about the Golden Record. Robleto says he first heard the recordings of Druyan’s brain waves when he was seven years old. A day he stayed home from school, because he was sick, happened to be the day that Voyager was approaching Jupiter. Though the record went into space on Voyagers I and 2 in 1977, in 1979 NASA took the opportunity of Voyager passing by Jupiter to re-engage the public with the mission by releasing a 1-800 number that anyone could call to hear the Golden Record’s recordings. A young Robleto, home alone, misunderstood the newscast and thought that the recordings had been made by extraterrestrials and intercepted by NASA. He excitedly called his mother at work to ask for permission to dial in to hear the message. She instructed him to wait, and when she returned home they listened in together. The sounds of the EEG and EKG were otherworldly, confusing, and disappointing.

Robleto told me, “It just crushed me, because I couldn’t understand, with so much at stake, why would the aliens be obtuse? Why would they send static? This disappointment, I internalized it so deeply. Over the years, I obviously learned more about it, but it wasn’t until 1991 that NASA finally released on CD to the public the full contents of the record. So for that decade, I did not forget, and I was one of the first people to buy that CD. I thought, ‘Okay, finally I can figure out what the hell was that sound.’ And, I get to the tracklist and all it says is ‘Life Signs.’ That’s it. Again, no context, and that further frustrated me.”

Robleto’s connection to and interest in the Golden Record extends across time. It wasn’t until 2007, when the Radiolab episode was released, that he realized he and Ann Druyan were both on the “Space” episode. For myself, listening to the episode at the time, I recalled that an artist was included, but did not remember that it was someone with a Texas connection. It wasn’t until nearly a week after I spent time with Robleto’s exhibition that I relistened to the episode and realized that it was him talking about a different body of work. But for Robleto, at the time, once he discovered that both he and Druyan were included in this radio story, he saw it as a sign to reach out to her to learn more about the recording that had mystified him for so long.

Starting in 2010, Robleto began making a series of small gifts for Druyan, and their connection eventually grew into a friendship. It was in the intervening years that Druyan revealed to Robleto the truth of what she was thinking during the Golden Record recording. Beyond that story being at the center of Robleto’s recent film, he told me that his work has long been geared toward the question, “What does one gift to the only woman whose heart has left the solar system?” 

Robleto’s answer is his work: his videos, his art, and a forthcoming book he is co-authoring, which has been 15 years in the making. Tentatively titled The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, the book is a collaboration between Robleto and Jennifer Roberts, an art historian and professor of the Humanities, and American and Contemporary Art at Harvard University, whose scholarship relates to arts and the natural sciences. 

Fascinated by Robleto’s ability to walk this line between art and science, I sought to better understand why this was of interest to him. A biology turned fine arts major, Robleto explained that he has long been interested in understanding why the arts and humanities split ways from the sciences. And understanding that division, he strives to mend the disciplines. Of course, these themes arise in his art, but so much of this repair work happens outside of visual art production. For example, last year, Robleto completed a five-year term as the inaugural Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. From 2017-2019, he served as an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering. In 2015, he was the artist consultant to a team of scientists working on Breakthrough Message, a multinational effort centered on communicating with potential extraterrestrials.

As to the “why” behind his efforts, Robleto points to a quote by Carl Sagan. In his book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality… The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” 

Robleto explained, “Science is so particular to not get in the business of meaning. It’s just observation, and there’s an effort to avoid interpretation… science needs a type of neutrality, but Carl was saying that that was a mistake at some level. That it wasn’t an all-or-nothing sort of thing… I’m not afraid of doing the interpretive work of major scientific discoveries or insights as a pathway to the spiritual, I think it’s important.”

Robleto also acknowledged both his mother and grandmother as early influences on the way he perceives and moves through the world, which reverberates through his art. He reminisced about spending time at the San Antonio honky tonk that his mother ran during his youth. He recalled listening to Patsy Cline on the jukebox and watching melancholy scenes like the ones in her songs play out in real-time in front of him. In hindsight, he said, “It made me realize that art is documentary too. It’s metaphoric, but its power is like science in its precision of description.”

He went on to discuss his mother’s career working in hospice care. Coming to understand the basic philosophy that the final moments of life are worthy of dignity as much as the first moments of life has greatly impacted his work. Robleto told me, “As much as I love art, as much as I love science, it is a hospice nurse who is my model of an artist. I have tried to make  my art and my practice align [with their philosophies].”

This talk about the end of life brought me back to two years ago, when I held my grandmother’s hand as she died. I watched her last breath leave her body. It was heartbreaking, and though I knew that she had been dying for some time, I wasn’t prepared. I had never been with someone at the end of their life, and U.S. society does so much to hide and not talk about death. But in those last moments, I was so grateful for the professional caregivers, the hospice nurses who knew just what to do — how to make her comfortable, and how to comfort me and my family. 

As it turns out, in 2005, Robleto too was present for the death of his grandmother. Rather than being aware of her breath, Robleto was focused on his grandmother’s heartbeat. As he sat by her side, at the moment she passed, he placed his hand on her chest. He felt her final five or six heartbeats and noted the peculiar way in which they behaved. In that moment he told her that he would do everything he could to understand her heart. To Robleto, while that meant the scientific understanding of what happens to the heart at the moment of death, he also felt the need to understand the one heart that had left the solar system.

All of this brings us back to the Golden Record. It calls into question what can be known from an EKG reading of a heart, and it is also a message hurled into the unknown as the Earth descends toward its eventual end. Some might ask why we would produce this document of human history and launch it into space where it will likely never be found. Robleto’s Ancient Beacons Long for Notice argues that “the vastness of space is not an argument for the futility of our actions.” He advocates for our planet’s dignity despite our inevitable demise. As for those big questions that humans have pondered since the beginning of time, Robleto continues a tradition of inquiry through scientific methods and explores the meanings of those findings through art.

Dario Robleto: The Signal is on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art through October 27, 2024.