Images, music and sounds for this video were found in the internet (2003).
Greetings: an utopia of peace in times of the cold war. Peaceful greetings by 55 nations of the earth to possible life forms in the universe. The video contains more than 100 different UFO movies found in the internet. The sound contains greetings in 55 languages and a speech of former UN-General-Secretary Kurt Waldheim, sent into space in 1977's Voyager mission on a golden record. Carl Sagan, project manager, has noted: "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." The video uncovers the attempt of constructing a peaceful and harmonic view on our planet as a helpless and melancholic utopia.
Exhibition Text, 2003
"I made this work while I was still a student at art school, at a moment when the internet was beginning to emerge as a vast image archive, years before platforms such as YouTube transformed the circulation of moving images. The work is assembled entirely from material found online: more than one hundred amateur UFO recordings collected from websites across the early web. I combined these images with greetings in 55 languages and a speech recorded for NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, launched into space in 1977 as a message to possible extraterrestrial life.
Downloading the footage was a slow and uncertain process that took days. The files were often tiny as a stamp, heavily compressed and fragmented. None of the source material was ever intended to be seen big: enlarged for a large-scale projection at Volksbühne Berlin, the fragments expanded to the size of tables and began to break apart, enhancing these imperfections.
From today's perspective, resolution itself has become historical. The amateur online video, once circulated as evidence, now appears almost archaeological, and the naive desire for peace on a changing, unstable planet remains unchanged, yet it moves me more today than it did when I created this work".
Niklas Goldbach, 2026