Diffracted orbits: the poetics of Voyager and the Golden Record in practice

This thesis is a practice-based interdisciplinary poetic investigation of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Voyager probe missions, launched in 1977, and the accompanying Golden Record phonograph discs of terran sounds and images. Broadly, I use poetics to critique these cultural texts while devising a poetic practice in response. My investigation begins with the NASA account of the above projects given in the book Murmurs Of Earth. This text frames Voyager as a rhetorical and cultural continuation of the settlement of North America, and defines the Record according to what I term a “capsular” imperial history, informed by Newtonian physics. I challenge this framing by reading Voyager and the Record as poetic structures, not historical narratives, while developing my own conception of poetics as an open-ended voyage between and within texts and practices.
My study responds to the work of Karen Barad, whose “agential realism” proposes that the absolute spatial and temporal boundaries of Newtonian physics systems are, in fact, ceaselessly reconfigured in the material practice of knowing. Following Donna Haraway, Barad offers diffraction as a creative-critical mode for intuitively understanding quantum physics. I answer Barad’s corresponding call for a “diffractive” practice by applying their methodologies to Voyager and Record materials, while pursuing commonalities with five broad poetic movements: Amy Catanzano’s “quantum poetics”; Charles Baudelaire’s lyric poetry, which is partially preserved on the Record; post-colonial erasure poems that take texts about voyaging as their subject; the looping, unresolved poetics of Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s V: Vniverse; and the poetics of navigation articulated by Situationist dérives and the later drift poetry of Ellie Ga. In the course of this study I offer working models for my poetic practice that culminate in a “diffracted” erasure of Voyager and the Record, organised according to principles of simultaneity and betweenness.