Open Hertzlab: Letters To Mars

A session on protocols, latency, and the rituals of Interplanetary contact with the artist Che-Wei Wang.

Earth and Mars are 3 to 22 light-minutes apart, meaning communication has an average delay of roughly 25 minutes. A message sent is a message already in the past. There are no conversations, only broadcasts and the ritual of waiting. And every two years, the Sun passes between the two planets and communication goes dark for about two weeks, a period NASA calls solar conjunction, when they stop sending commands entirely and the rovers wait it out.

How will vast distances and long dealys of communication shape the way we live, connect, and celebrate?

This session treats these constraints, delay, blackout, information corruption, orbital geometry, not as problems to be solved but as the defining features of the medium. What kinds of relationships emerge when immediate exchange is impossible? What forms of care, trust, memory, and attention become necessary when every message is a broadcast into the future and the past? We will imagine how time delays and communication lapses transform human connection in imagined future worlds.

Join us to design a protocol and build your prototype communication station based on interplanetary constraints: delay, asymmetry, uncertainty, blackout, corruption, and absence.

You are cordially invited. Just come along!

Meeting point: 2nd floor above Atrium 9 – access via the exhibitions