The Space Song Foundation is a non-profit organization founded by visionary artists and scientists to design and fabricate technology that supports long-range space missions, while promoting long-term thinking at the intersection of art, science, and design.

The primary project of the Space Song Foundation is the Tree of Life, a public art/science project that connects Earth to outer space through a song, which is sent via radio waves between an orbiting spacecraft and an unlikely technological component: a set of terrestrial trees that have been activated to operate as large, living antenna systems. The trees and spacecraft will sing a song to each other continuously for centuries, which will be recorded in real time for 200 years. The song is formed by long-term data sets that describe the trees’ experience of life on Earth (light, soil moisture, and temperature), and the spacecraft’s long-term operational capacity (energy, velocity, communication bandwidth, etc.). The numbers in these data sets are translated into sonic frequencies that are communicated between the trees and spacecraft via radio, so that ultimately, the trees and spacecraft sing a duet for 200 years. The song is open-source and accessible to the public; DJ’s can re-mix it, and scientists can use it to detect shifts that can be difficult to glean from centuries-long sets of numbers.

Our spacecraft pushes the constraints of technological obsolescence by operating continuously for 200 years, beyond the short time frames of our Earthly cell phones or laptops. The Tree of Life generates research that helps scientists and designers plan a future interstellar spacecraft that can operate over decades and light years, and a platform for the public to envision a long-term sense of the future–we believe that we can all use a creative sense of hope these days. Our system makes trees central to the technology in order to challenge designers to think beyond our human time frames, which is especially relevant at a moment when space exploration is increasingly accessible to private tech interests, while the detritus of e-waste threatens life on our home planet. As we strive to explore places further out in space, we will need technology and communication systems that operate beyond our human timeframes.

The team is co-led by Julia Christensen (artist, writer and Young-Hunter Professor of Studio Art at Oberlin College, Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Fellow) and Steve Matousek (manager of the Mars Exploration team at NASA/JPL, who has led over 20 major mission proposals and worked on or managed missions from the Voyager to Juno to MarCo, and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 2012). Other members of the team include Dr. Alessandra Babuscia, Telecommunications engineer at NASA/JPL who has led radio communication for missions from Venus (VERITAS) to Mars (Mars 2020); Joel Ferree, Director of LACMA’s Art + Tech Lab; Judy Lai-Norling, COO of Carbon Mapper, an initiative that tracks methane and COs point-source emissions from air and space; Roger Klemm, space mission test engineer at NASA/JPL; sound engineer Tom Hall, artist and developer at Cycling ‘74 (Max/MSP).