VASE LECTURES

Photo by Sean Su

Dario Robleto

Film and Q&A:
Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 6:30 pm
Marroney Theatre

VASE Lecture:
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 5:30 pm
Center for Creative Photography

Ancient Beacons Long for Notice

In this lecture, Robleto will discuss his interdisciplinary approach to crafting and conveying messages of emotion and identity into the cosmos, a kind of ‘humanities off-planet.” What should we communicate about ourselves to beings we may never meet? How might we be remembered even after our last breath?

Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is also the title of Robleto’s third film in his trilogy exploring the history and legacy of the Golden Record. Launched in 1977, this record is attached to NASA’s Voyager I and II space probes, which were designed to explore the outer Solar System.

(Note: The night before his VASE lecture, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 6:30, Robleto will screen the film for free at the Marroney Theatre, 1025 N. Olive Road, followed by a Q&A.)

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 American artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Houston, Texas. His work has been exhibited widely and is held in prominent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media outlets, including Radiolab, Krista Tippett’s On Being, and the New York Times. Robleto has served as a visiting artist, researcher, and lecturer at various cultural and scientific institutions, including the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT, and the Center for the Advancement and Study of Visual Art at the National Gallery.

From 2018 to 2023, he was Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. His awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the USA Rasmuson Fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant. In 2016, Robleto was appointed Texas State 3-D Visual Artist, and in 2025, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College. He is currently working on his first book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, co-authored with Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts, which will be published by Scribner in 2027.