The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth...

Apart from this lovely gallery, my other haven from the flyering madness on the Royal Mile was The Collective Gallery's great The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth exhibition curated by Mel Brimfield.

Where comedians, artists and filmmakers collaborated on various audio visual pieces all inspired by the materials placed on the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 to introduce our culture to alien races via music and photos and smiling naked people. Like this one Termite Notification For Future Life Forms.

The first gallery consisted of 116 works the size of vinyl album covers each and intereptation of the 116 'images of earth' compiled by Nasa, see the images and loads more here. Youtube clip of the images here.

There was also a viewing room played a documentary by Brimfield and Sally O' Reilly which focused on Carl Sagan and Earth Ambassador for Earth Contact Day Karen Carptenter. In cynical times it was a refreshing nostalgia trip to hear things like UN chief's potential greatings for alien races.

The second room consisted of a series of 3-5 minute pieces from artists, comedians, actors, poets (including Stewart Lee, John Hegley and Robert Ince and Lawrence and Gus ) of their prospective greetings to aliens. It was quite a haven after seeing stand up all day to sit in dark room and not get asked 'are you afraid of terrorism?' or 'who here's from England, give us a cheer...whose here from Scotland' (shudder), although some bits were obvious sections of some performers stand up and one animation on hair uttered the phrase 'like a wisp of cotton candy over a paper cut' but more tales of that later.

Once of my favorite experiences in Edinburgh overall I'd have to say to get an oasis of sci-fi arty geekness among all the comedy.