After the “100 Iterations“ I wanted to focus on another snippet from my Elaborate project. The 100 banana variations felt too arbitrary and didn’t reflect the way I want my work to be. I started to look at the Arecibo Message – besides the Golden Record, another reference I used in the Elaborate project. A 1679-digit long binary code radio transmission broadcasted into space in 1974 to start an initial attempt to contact foreign alien life. One of the first things that came to my mind when I read about the message, was that the content is a very simplified and boiled-down visualisation of the identity of the human race. Trying to concentrate something as complex as life on earth into one single transmission comes with heavy losses in the variety of messages by different cultures, belief systems and other perspectives on humankind. Also, the fact that not only the content was condensed but also the transmission itself was limited to one single attempt lowered or even brought the chances close to zero for a chance to receive a response.
Last week I started out by asking myself how the unknown audience could have potentially decoded the content and what that meant for the clarity of the information conveyed. So the question was how do different assumptions on decoding the message influence the information?
The original Arecibo message is created in a 73 by 23-pixel format and can be just read when it is decoded in that way. When receiving the binary code there is no initial hint or message, that reveals the format. By choosing two prime numbers, the message creators limited the possibilities on how to arrange the digits. Also, the total number of signals equals 73 by 23 exactly.
But as a trial, I wanted to see what happens when the message is decoded into a wrong format. How does the content change and can you still decipher some bits of the information?
Before altering the format I tried to decode the original binary code, written in 1’s and 0’s by hand.
Of course, I knew the original format, but I didn’t know that in most cases where the message is shown the reading direction is from right to left.
This made me not only did I alter the format but also the direction the message can be decoded. You can either decode every line from left to right, from right to left and lastly a mixture of both where the reading direction changes every line. At first, I took the initial message and made two further iterations changing the reading directions to see what it would do to the information. For the following iterations, I first doubled the width of the format, changed the reading directions and then tripled the width and changed the reading directions another time. The nine possible ways the message can be decoded show different degrees to how the content is affected. In some iterations, you can still see faint depictions and alterations that change the interpretation of the original symbols. In contrast, the numeric content isn’t decipherable anymore.
There are also some other routes I took into consideration but didn’t follow through.
I asked myself how the content will be influenced when the medium changes and also asked myself about the general approaches mankind has taken to contact extraterrestrial species and if there is a way to visualise that data based on method, content and medium.
After all the research and iterations I was left with the thought of if I can somehow create messages that challenge the universal approach and send out more individual messages gathered by asking people through a survey on what message they would send to potential alien life. But from the feedback in the tutorials I learned that this would probably lead to way too arbitrary information.
From that, I went on an exploration if I can somehow create my own binary code radio signal and broadcast it into space. I found out how to write numbers in binary code, researched the broadcast frequency which is 1420-1720 MHz (called „The Water-Hole“) and has something to do with the energy shift of the electrons in Hydrogen and Oxygen which creates an energy burst that shoots out on these two frequencies. Two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom together create water, thus „The Water Hole“. Also, on the range of these frequencies, it is very quiet in the universe and the signals are unlikely to be distorted by dust, gas and other things in space. Inspired by Thomas Thwaites „Toaster Project“ I wanted to also go on a journey of creating my own message but soon found out that you have to have a radio license in order to do so.
I guess exploring how to send out my own message was a way to avoid thinking about the content I could produce/collect in order to create my own messages. It is hard to choose what I want to put in the message, since I don’t want to speak for anyone. At the same time Carl Sagan and Frank Drake who made the Arecibo message once said:
„Maybe E.T. would be smarter when the signal finally
reached somewhere, but the real point of such messages,
Dr. Drake and Dr. Sagan always admitted, was to raise
the consciousness of those of us back here on Earth and an
awareness of our own status as cosmic travelers in an
unknown and obviously weird universe.“
(Overbye, 2020)
So maybe I shouldn’t worry about the content after all. The audience probably won’t be able anyways to read and interpret the message correctly since it is constructed to be as broad as possible and not being created for an audience we exactly know how they consume messages.
I’m still intrigued in asking people for their own messages and try to visualise that using the system of the Arecibo.
When thinking about Hito Steyerls „In Defense of the poor image“ he mainly talks about images/information being created and spread in a high resolution but then slowly degrading through the many ways of the transmission process. In my case, the image includes a transmission, but it is singular and also the message is created to be a poor image. It is so densely compressed that the message, initially made to capture everything in a very general way, now captures almost nothing.
The transmission process is in this case the least bit that influences the content of the message in contrast to „In defense of the poor image“. There is just something that is being lost when focussing too much on making everything work for everyone. The broader you try to make your audience the more cryptic your message gets. Also the other way around. The more specific your audience gets the more cryptic the message for most people.
Also, Ian Lyman discusses something similar in his text „Why we should really be concerned about the visual identity for the Tokyo Olympics“. He is of the opinion that the Olympic identity design is a playing field to capture the zeitgeist of an era and bring it to life. Examples of earlier identity design of the Olympics show how much love for detail, design and the current decade influenced the design. The last example unfortunately shows a rather bland counterpart design for the latest Olympics that couldn’t take place. A mere template design additionally set up as a design competition fueling speculative design. The complexity and individuality is completely lost in the design templates. The pre-defined look doesn’t capture anything the Olympics should be about and doesn’t seem like it could excite, move and inspire someone. The message in this case is so broad that it can’t seem to reach anyone.
Following this my aim is to challenge the universal approach of creating a message. Individuality over universality.
Steyerl, Hito: In Defense of the poor Image;’The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012
Overbye, Dennis: A Rip in the Fabric of Interstellar Dreams, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2020
Lyman, Ian: ’Why we should really be concerned about the visual identity for the Tokyo Olympics’, https://medium.com/@ianlynam/why-we-should-really-be-concerned-about-the-visual-identity-for-the-tokyo-olympics-969830d0e819, 2015