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If you have any interest in the problem of accessibility in art, you owe it to yourself to consider the Golden Record. A gold-plated phonograph disc packed full of Earthly imagery and audio, from Peruvian wedding songs through genetic formulae to pictures of US supermarkets, it was launched into space aboard the Voyager probes in the late Seventies. You could call it "a message in a bottle" about Earth to hypothetical star-faring civilisations, in the words of leonine celebrity scientist Carl Sagan. You could compare it, a little less kindly, to the "cabinets of curiosities" owned by European oligarchs and aristocrats during the Renaissance - Earth's riches bagged and tagged by the reigning superpower for extraterrestrial appreciation. But the more appropriate term, perhaps, is "puzzle".While the Record's creators understood that theirs was largely a symbolic gesture, given the astronomically low odds of each Voyager probe's recovery, they engaged whole-heartedly with the idea that it would need to be deciphered by another species, millennia from now. What form might this species take? And how to explain something as vast, ornate and gruesome as human history to a life-form that, say, perceives the world entirely as scent? What at first seems a question of representative curation warps into something uncannily like a problem of game design, of interface and signposting, amassing common ground between creator and audience. The Record's architects speculate plausibly that maths can serve as a universal language, because two plus two will always equal four wherever you go in the cosmos, but what about a photograph of a man pouring water into his mouth? What if the confused recipients decoded the image the wrong way up and mistook the jug for a living entity, drinking from the man?
It's a challenge to send the most battle-hardened of UI departments galloping for the spirits cabinet. "It's one thing to have it all in a book with [the images] all laid out on these pages, but if you're experiencing this one thing at a time, even if you do it sequentially, it's an odd story," observes the designer Eliott Johnson, one half of youthful UK studio Broken Fence Games. "The connective tissue between these pictures is non-existent." The Record's daunting objective is also, however, an opportunity to reconsider and reimagine many of the things we take for granted, contemplating them as if for the first time. This is an idea integral to Broken Fence's fascinating debut A Light In Chorus - a first-person exploration game composed of luminous, undersea particles which casts you as an alien visiting Earth, playing back notes from the Golden Record to shift between a ruined, post-human future and the present day.
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