A R K Project

A R K is an archive for a future intelligence. In a 2021 interview with Cittadellarte, Artist G! described it as “an archive project intended for the future advent of an artificial intelligence that will ask itself, What is it to be human?” Begun in 2020, A R K gathers people one portrait at a time — a record of human diversity, kept for that question.

It begins with a line.

Each portrait is drawn in a single, unbroken stroke — a short act of attention held between two people for as long as the sitting takes. Nothing is corrected, nothing repeated. The line either meets the other person, or it doesn’t.

What remains is not only drawn. Alongside the line, the portrait is encoded into synthetic DNA and sealed into a capsule small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Within it, a trace of the participant’s own DNA is held in a capsule no larger than a fingertip, engraved with the coordinates of its own making: a face, a strand of code, a pair of figures standing side by side. One capsule, one person, one small archive.

Gathered together, the capsules are meant to form something larger: an archive built one face at a time, carrying — in principle — the portraits of a hundred billion people, present and future.

A message that leaves

The archive is not meant to stay on Earth.

Carried aloft, it climbs past the inner planets, gathering speed through gravitational assists at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, until it reaches the roughly 17 km/s needed to escape the Sun’s pull. Some fifteen to twenty years after launch, it crosses the edge of the heliosphere — the outer boundary of the Solar System — and enters interstellar space.

From there, the journey is measured in a different kind of time. At its cruising speed, the archive will take more than forty thousand years to cross a single light-year. Its approximate heading is toward the constellation Boötes, and a star some sixty-eight light-years away.

It is not built to arrive. It is built to last — a quiet, physical message that human beings were here, and that they looked at one another closely enough to draw a line.

Growing the archive

A R K is growing, and is currently seeking partners and support to reach its full scale.

Artist G! and A R K were featured in Human Light: Artist G: From the Neuroscience of Bias to the Architecture of Presence.