A Trips Festival for the Digital Age

Sónar seeks to bridge the worlds of art and technology, the popular and the avant garde, and club culture and cyberculture

Leading up to each edition of Sónar is a visual messaging campaign that’s come to be known as the SónarImage. This year’s SónarImage, above, was a short film, ‘Je te tiens’, directed by Sónar co-founder Sergio Caballero.

Two series of radio transmissions are currently beaming through interstellar space — bound, their senders hope, for intelligent life on a distant planet. The transmissions contain 38 encoded pieces of music, each ten seconds in length, created by far-out but nonetheless earth-bound musicians.

At this writing, the first of the transmissions will have recently exited the Oort cloud, an expanse of icy cometary nuclei made of cosmic dust. It is expected to reach its destination, the exoplanet GJ273b, on November 3rd, 02030¹–12.5 years after it was sent from Earth. The second transmission will arrive six months later.

The exoplanet, known as Luyten’s Star, appears to meet the necessary conditions to harbor life. If it does, and if it is intelligent life, and if its denizens deign to reply, the soonest Earthlings can hope to hear back is 02043.

For the organizers of Sónar, an arts, design and electronic music festival in Barcelona, Spain, that would constitute perfect timing. The festival partnered with METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to send the radio transmissions last year for its 25th…