Film Screening: Dario Robleto, "Ancient Beacons Long for Notice"

Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the third installment of a film trilogy by artist Dario Robleto that explores the history and legacy of the Golden Record. This screening is organized in conjunction with Rice University's Space Humanities Initiative and coincides with Moody's Tent Series, which includes artwork from the artist drawn from this film. Following the screening, Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Alexander Regier, Rice's William Faulkner Professor of English, will lead a Q&A with the artist about the film and his forthcoming book co-authored with Roberts, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: The Golden Record and Our Search for Connection.

About the Film

Launched in 1977, the Golden Record is attached to NASA’s Voyager I and II space probes, which were designed to explore the outer Solar System. The gold discs contain images, languages, music, and sounds representing the diversity of life and cultures on Earth. Created by a team of scientists led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record was a hopeful gesture, carefully curated to present humanity’s “best face forward” in a first-contact scenario with other intelligent life forms; any traces of war, injustice, famine, or environmental decay were intentionally omitted. The film examines the implications of this ethos across time and space through new research on a forgotten document: the earliest audio recording of warfare, made in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI. Robleto’s film asks: “What is our moral obligation to fully account for our actions—the good and the bad—in perpetuity, off-planet, and to beings we have yet to confirm exist?”

About the Artist

Dario Robleto is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. In his research-driven practice, he makes intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, science, war, and history. His work is held in prominent collections including the National Gallery of Art, LACMA, the Menil, and the Whitney, and he has been profiled in The New York Times, Radiolab, and Krista Tippett’s On Being. Robleto has been a visiting artist and lecturer at Harvard, Northwestern, Bard, MIT, RISD, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. In 2025, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College and was named Texas Artist of the Year by Art League, Houston.

About the Panel

Jennifer L. Roberts is Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. An award-winning art historian, she focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, particularly astronomy. She is the author of numerous books and essays on American art and science from the eighteenth century to the present. Her work on slow looking and extreme attention was featured in Oliver Burkeman’s bestselling book Four Thousand Weeks. Her latest book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: The Golden Record and Our Search for Connection, co-authored with artist Dario Robleto, will be published in 2027 by Scribner.
Alexander Regier is the William Faulkner Professor of English at Rice University, with a joint appointment in Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures. His honors include fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is the author of Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations (Oxford, 2018) and Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2010). He is completing Awkwardness: The History and Art of Unease and writing a book on the creaturely in Blake, Büchner, Quiroga, and Celan. From 2011 to 2022, he edited SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.
This program was co-developed by the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice Space Humanities, and the artist Dario Robleto.