the documentation about spaceflight
certainly different than he does it. But
his filter, let’s say, is from the eyes of a
17 year old with a great passion.”
Martin worries that MOM might
appear to others as some “crazy idea
from some bizarre artist”. He takes crit-
icism seriously, tweaking the project,
trying to balance the three streams of
information. “Good artists and good
scientists have to have a similar feel
of their field,” he said. “They have to
walk a path outside the normal path.
They have to see new connections and
develop new theories ... I think the
MOM project is a crossover between
art and science.”
TO MAKE IT WORK,though, requires
a hard-nosed practical side as well.
Martin said he’d made “very strong
contacts” with Saltzwelten. “Even if
they sell the company, the next owner
is also bound to keep MOM inside
forever,” he said.
To help future beings find the
archive, Martin has created fired clay
tokens that are a kind of treasure map.
Inscribed with an outline of Europe, it
has two lines crisscrossing at the salt
mine at Hallstatt. On the flip side is an
etching of the perimeter of a nearby
lake, as well as a cube that signifies
both a salt crystal and the salt mine
on its shores. “I imagine future finders
will have the technology to replicate
the shape of the lake bed,” Martin said.
He gives the tokens to tourists,
MOM contributors, any interested
party, really, and has an agreement
with the Arch Mission Foundation to
have them sprinkled throughout the
solar system. The token would lead
beings to Martin’s trove. Then they
would see how much we loved celeb-
rities and reality shows on TV. They’d
be able to track all of our neuroses and
conspiracy theories (crop circles! the
Illuminati!) and revisionist histories, in
search of our truth.
They’d also see how we tried and
failed, and how we loved, and how
we grieved. One of Martin’s favourite
tablets, from four years ago, was given
to an Austrian girl named Fanny for
her confirmation, and she was allowed
to design it. “It had that kid energy,”
said Martin. It included photographs
of her family and the music group in
which she played. When Fanny died
in a car accident, her aunt came back
to Martin, wanting a second tablet toOne of the clay map tokens that will
help future beings find the archivePHOTO: ANTONY LYONS66 august 2019
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