Feed on the Earth

Feed on the Earth imagines a food-worshipping alien civilization misreading NASA’s Golden Record as a cookbook of Earth’s creatures. Using lumen print and image-text deconstruction, the project explores meaning shifts and questions human-centered position

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2, each carrying a gold-plated copper record designed to represent humanity to the universe. These records contained encoded information about Earth—human anatomy, nature, tools, languages, music, and culture—presented from a distinctly human-centered perspective.

But what if this gesture, meant to communicate peace and knowledge, became a “suicidal act”? Imagine a distant planet where "food" is the highest form of civilization. With altered perception, the record could be misread as a cookbook cataloging Earth’s species.

This speculative scenario forms the basis of my project Feed on the Earth. I created a fictional "Human Eating Method Research Notebook" from the perspective of alien life forms. Using lumen printing—a photographic process known for its unpredictability—I distorted the original Golden Record images, emphasizing how visual meaning can shift through randomness and context.

I further restructured the image-text relationships, deconstructing and reorganizing the visuals and accompanying descriptions. This recontextualization highlights the instability of meaning, exploring how images can be interpreted in contradictory ways across different cultural or non-human frameworks.

Feed on the Earth challenges assumptions about knowledge-sharing, authorship, and the risks of projecting human narratives into the unknown.