American artist and “experimental geographer” Trevor Paglen travels to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to document the launch of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI in today’s special reportage. Unlike the 1000s of other craft pointed towards the stars, this one harbored a message for the distant future in the form of an innocuous capsule bolted to its exterior and containing the multi-disciplinary creator’s latest work, The Last Pictures. Commissioned by New York's Creative Time, the object contains a silicon wafer micro-etched with 100 archival black-and-white images, selected as photographic documents of recent human history. "Images do not make arguments the same way a scientific paper makes an argument,” Paglen says of his choice of medium. “The way they communicate is much more impressionistic and affective, and by playing with those relationships I was able let the images do what they want to do.” The disc is encased in a gold-plated aluminum cover with further imprints on its surface that maps when—not where—it comes from. “The project is more about going into time than into space,” explains its architect. The satellite now appears in the night sky as a fixed, manmade glowing sphere, joining Earth’s orbital rings for the rest of time. An ironic wink at extra-terrestrial beings who may one day come across it, the archive functions as a cave painting in space, a prescient epitaph for an extinct civilization, or as Paglen puts it, "a silent film for the future".