Tohuwabohu

Since my draft wasn’t long enough to get a good sense of where it is going to head, the peer feedback I got surrounded the questions of whether there is an open-ended question and how this writing links to my “Triangulate 1“. By this point the writing wasn’t exploring image-based communication yet and listed general historic events that happened and started to hint at the topic of “finding a common ground“ in communication. 

Tutor feedback involved that the enquiry is implicit in the form of writing I chose and the way historical and theoretical evidence was woven into the writing was seen as good. To address the unknown directly forced me to write in an accessible way. Maybe the structure of the writing could reflect one of my references more, which is Hans Freudenthal and the „universal language“, called Lincos (lingua cosmica) he created to send messages to a higher intelligence. The logograms are arranged in the message to explain mathematics and physics. This allows a higher intelligence to decipher the logograms and their meaning if they know mathematics and physics. The key of deciphering is inherent in the message. I was struggling to incorporate this structure within the writing and decided to use the writing as a tool to explore the different directions I am interested in. 

Also, I got feedback on the way the writing could be presented. I haven’t thought about this yet but might have and idea. I was told that it would already help to have some images included that show the references and outline the writing. 

How do you approach writing about communicating with an unknown entity? What form should my writing take on and how could the form of my writing support my enquiry?

After the first tutorial, I struggled with starting my writing. I wasn’t quite sure how to structure it since “Triangulate 1“ didn’t really work out the way I wanted and I felt a little bit lost. There were several different routes I was interested in taking and a lot of terms and questions that I had:

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Subject Matters?
Identity, Misinformation, Miscommunication, Pictoral Language systems, Communicating with an unknown audience, Failure, Perfectionism, Mistakes, Constraints, Representation of identity, objects, Bias/Stereotypes, single-sided stories of identities in pop culture/media, Surrealism

Methods
Curation, Participatory Curation, Illustration, time-based media, multiple mediums/methods.
Tackle a topic with a multidimensional approach (illumination the subject from different angles),  instead of focusing on one single method (one-dimensional)

Questions?
– How does graphic communication design shape the way we represent our identities?
– What role does graphic communication design have in the process of forming our identities?
Representation, Access to tools/knowledge/media etc, design history, cultural influences in graphic design?, (Diversity in graphic design practices, Western design/art history, in education, Industrial design,…
„Using participatory curation and a multifaceted practice to form a body of narratives surrounding individual perspectives on identity?“

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With “Triangulate 1“ I wanted to have people express their thoughts about identity through a rigid system to an unknown entity. To counterpart the Golden Record and collect a multiplicity of thoughts on the identity of humans. I didn’t realise that I was actually just creating a system to create abstract images. But what does that mean in terms of communicating with an unknown entity?

During the first tutorial, I came up with the thought of using the writing to talk to the unknown entity. The writing should be a one-sided conversation between the entity and me. Which ends up becoming a monolog. The writing includes casual sentences which personalise the content. Everyone who reads it starts to become an unknown entity and starts putting themselves in their shoes. 

I decided to use my writing to explore the ways of communicating with an unknown entity, attempts that have already been made and if there are different ways of finding a common ground within communicating with someone you can’t even comprehend. 

Here you can find the initial draft for my writing that I brought to the second tutorial of Triangulate 2:

The interactive website and some inital website responses that I presented were mostly confusing in a sense that the question posed on the website is too broad for the user to capture their response/express themselves with a very constraining system of pre-formed shapes. In order to be able to collect valuable information/knowledge from the participatory website I would have to focus the question to generate very targeted answers.

The outcomes were very much based around the fact that there were face features included in the selection of shapes which resulted in people constructing faces. Because the features were too prominent and less abstract in comparison to the other shapes it was suggested to take the face features out. Including them already suggested the user to build a face although the face features were just added in case there was a need to create a face.

Also, the constraint of just having a couple of generic shapes, without being able to rotate them or change the size, to answer such a broad question left some people frustrated. There was an interesting point said about the frustration of not being able to capture your thoughts with this system to descibe the term „identity“ and how that says a lot about identity itself – how it can’t be just answered through this one-dimensional and very restrained channel. But that identity is a complex subject that can’t be pinned down very easily.

Suggestions were mainly about the usability of the website in terms of adding more constraints, making it more frustrating or making several websites with different kinds of constraints. And as already said the research question has to be more focused, so the user can be more clear with their answer. 

Bingo

Word: Universality

Method: A One-Page Website

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After the dice decided my faith I was once again left with total confusion. “Universality“ – why did I even decide to write this vague term down? How am I going to tackle making a one-page website (hint: I’m nowhere near knowing how to code) about universality? Where should I even start? I could fill this page with literally anything..

One thing I knew was that I didn’t want to make a website just for displaying information. My website should become a tool for generating or collecting data. But data about what? Universality?! – certainly not.. 

Once again looking back to my previous project I decided to go back to one of my all-time references – the good old Golden Record. One of the first messages sent out into space in order to reach out to potential extraterrestrials. After looking at the transmission of the Arecibo Message and the simplification of information and how that influences the original information and the interpretation by the receiver, I was still interested in the content that was chosen for these messages. The way we decided to portray humankind to present ourselves to our potential cosmic neighbours. Our curated and fabricated identity. 

A representation of humankind through a collection of images, music, sounds from earth with actively leaving out images of war, famine, violence etc.. should depict life on earth as a utopian way of life. The curator behind the Golden Record was Carl Sagan and his committee of the Cornell University for NASA. The record should capture the diversity of life and culture on earth and is targeted towards any intelligent life form that may encounter and be able to decipher it. The content, selected by a small number of people, tries to capture life on earth in a very universal approach which makes the message very one-dimensional.

This universal approach to condensing human identity into one message made me want to collect different views on identity. Views that are not just translated into text but also depicted by some kind of imagery the user can create themselves through using the website. A system with simple geometrical shapes and a few facial features should restrict the user to generate their answer to the question „What does identity mean to you?“.

Some of the answers I got from a couple of participants. I noticed that most of them used the face features instantly to build something that should resemble a face. Also I got feedback that several wanted to rotate or scale the shapes in order to use them in a certain way. Plus, it was hard to utilise the rigid systems with shapes in order to portray their thoughts on a loaded and very broad term like “identity”.

I know… my visual essay is way too long… But from what I’ve learned and questioned during this project is that simplicity and condensing content is not always the right way to go. Of course sometimes it can be helpful to keep it concise about what you want to convey but sometimes being concise can be dangerous because it makes problems look easier/simpler than they are which could also suggest easier and quicker solutions. Being percise about information sometimes can just be reached by finding the right amount of content for what you want to communicate. Benjamin Bratton said in his TED Talk “New Perspectives – What is wrong with TED Talks” that problems are complex and difficult and can’t just be resolved in an instance by just rearranging existing pieces. Making everything simple, condensed and boiled down so that it can be “swallowed without chewing” (Bratton, 2013) doesn’t challenge transformation and innovation. Complexity over simplicity.

Nowadays we consume images within milliseconds without even questioning if we decrypted and interpreted the image how it was intended to be. The potential of complexity is lost since we train our brains just to crave fast-food information. My visual essay is counter-content, a revelation against condensation and spoonfeeding what is conveyed. The content is complex and by simplifying it the message and meaning would be buried in generalised terms and images without even rudimentarily touching upon what has been explored.

Keep it complex!

My brain is wired to always do everything how it’s supposed to. Follow the rules, don’t step out of line, never say something wrong… As so with communicating I always want to make sure everything said and done can’t be interpreted in a way that wasn’t intended by me. But after going on this journey of exploring the Arecibo Message and trying to take on the role of the unknown audience trying to decrypt the message I came to realise that you can never 100% make sure that all the messages, signals, information, images etc. you send out always make it through to the receiver exactly like you sent it. Encrypting the message and transmitting it is already tied to many different possibilities on how the original message can be influenced in a way that changes the meaning completely. 

The Arecibo message was made to be sent out on a frequency between 1420 and 1720 MHz which is supposed to be a frequency range that travels through space with the least possibility of being distorted by space dust and other space objects. But at the same time contradictory to that encrypting the content in binary code within binary code, 4 different reading directions and a one-time submission already distorts the message in a way that makes the decryption process and interpretation really difficult. When it comes to the content, since the first time I somehow really cared about the content and always asked myself why it is kept that condensed and universal. It would make sense to have a universal message first and follow up with more individual approaches since you don’t know how your unknown audience interprets the initial message. Maybe it needs different approaches in order to cover a bandwidth of ways to communicate. Also sending out the message just once lowers/demolishes the chances of having anyone out there capture the message. Through these thoughts, I came to realise that I really want to focus on creating information, things, images, projects, etc. that choose individuality and complexity over generality and simplicity. I still always fall back into habits of trying to make everything work for everyone and forget that in the end my creation doesn’t cater or speak to anyone. Crystallizing out more personal, individual narratives and interests is something I want to pursue and what I took away from engaging with the exploration of a 70s space message. 

I’m not sure exactly what „networks“ mean if it is networks of people, of databanks or something similar but being in London and being surrounded by the most amazing galleries and museums I’m already really inspired and influenced by certain designers and artists I encountered. For example Yinka Shonibare CBE. Tate Modern hosts an artwork of his including 2,700 books on which spines are the names of first or second-generation immigrants to Britain printed in gold and bound in Dutch patterned and colourful wax fabric very well known in Nigerian culture. Shonibare’s dual identity, which is Nigerian and British, really influences his work so he creates work that explores colonialism, cultural appropriation and national identity. His work really speaks to me and is something I’m also really interested in since I also identify and someone split between two identities. I have to say though that I’m a bit concerned and intimidated by the weight of the content and would have to approach topics like that very carefully and slowly since I’m also not used to exploring topics that personal.

Since my goal is to find a clearer voice and position in what I’m doing and also am really interested in very personal projects I want to use this summer break to start out with something I initially was interested in the Associate project. I’m not really sure if I want to continue working on the Iterate and Position project but maybe I will change my mind and find something I would want to take further.  The reason for wanting to go back to the Associate project lies within my experience growing up in Germany with products from Nigeria that can just be bought in rare to find African or Asian shops. Coming here and seeing all the products and groceries everywhere I vainly searched for in German supermarkets always leaves me behind with pure excitement and nostalgic joy. I want to also further explore how I can use illustration in ways that work for me.

Furthermore, I want to take my Elaborate project further which was about perfectionism and imperfectionism. I really enjoy the method of collecting and interrogating collections with different methods. Also, I came to find out during the Elaborate project that I’m really interested in objects and their metaphorical character. Right now I’m not sure where that project could take me but as everyone on this course says (and I still struggle to internalise) „the process is the outcome.“

I came across the Arecibo message years ago and was always quite fascinated by the format and the content of it. The idea of creating a message directed towards a potential audience without having any indications of how the audience is like is very interesting to me. Trying to create a message using limited methods like the binary code, plus considering the importance of the content is very challenging. This raises the question of why the attempt to contact alien life was boiled down to one universal message that also was broadcasted into space just once. The chances of anyone paying attention to that specific direction in space and at that specific time are very low. With this project, my aim is to challenge the universal approach of sending one single important message into space. I want to focus on individuality over universality. Inspired by the Monday lecture from the 10.May.2021 by Studio Safar I want to use the medium of the Arecibo message to analyse and visualise messages, voices, or data that are underrepresented. I’m not sure yet how to filter out and decide which topics I want to include but first I want to focus on dissecting the initial message and get a better understanding of the content, the hierarchy, the different kinds of information included, the way it is encrypted and the format of the message.

After analysing the message I decided to go forward and ask people about what objects/information they would send out into space. Then, it was time to learn how to use binary code in order to encrypt numbers and letters in the message. I wanted to focus on using the original format and system to investigate the simplifying of the content, especially of the image-based content. How much is lost and what is gained from creating „poor images“? Also, how does the encryption, transmission, decryption and interpretation of these pixel images influence the content originally conveyed?

For me the content has always been very important and something that took me a really long time to decide on. Although Carls Sagan and Frank Drake (the creators of the Arecibo message) themselves said that the content doesn’t matter it kind of still mattered to me (Overbye, 2020). It made me think about how it is very common on Social Media to post, share and save images without even considering or thinking about the importance and also origin of the content. We are shraring images and posting things that soemtimes weren’t created to communicate anything. No second thought. Just and image shared for the sake of being shared and seen for the sake of being spoonfed empty content. If we send empty messages have we decided to communicate with an unkown or non-existing/not yet existing audience? Are we trying to find the audience that would interpret the message in a way that suits us? Empty content seems like fish bait attracting any kind of attention you can get and valuing all of it. 

For my visual essay I had two different approaches in mind. I thought about an 70s/80s inspired „How to“ video which would also be a hommage to the decade the Arecibo originated from and it would introduce the complex content into a interesting format. Carl Sagan was very well known for being a master in explaining difficult and complex content in a way to make it accessable for everyone outside the field of astophysics. 

My project is very complex and would suffer from being condensed too much but the structure of the „How to“ Video would certainly help in conveying the content. 

Although I’m trying to make my project understandable for the essay viewer I’m very hesitant in condensing all of the information and journey. The process is the outcome and it needs to be presented appropriately otherwise the project would suffer from information loss. 

Benjamin Bratton said in his TED Talk “New Perspectives – What is wrong with TED Talks” that problems are complex and difficult and can’t just be resolved in an instance by just rearranging existing pieces. Making everything simple, condensed and boiled down so that it can be “swallowed without chewing” (Bratton, 2013)  doesn’t challenge transformation and innovation. Complexity over simplicity. 

Overbye, Dennis: A Rip in the Fabric of Interstellar Dreams, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2020

Bratton, Benjamin: What’s Wrong with TED Talks?’, TEDxSanDiego, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 ,2013

Also, after already deciding on the “How to Video” for the visual essay I was still really inspired by :

Steyerl, Hito: How not to be seen a fucking didactic educational mov. File;  2013, https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651, 25.05.2021

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

The „100 Screengrabs“ were supposed to be a straightforward approach to an iterative working method. A set up of constraints and time limitations were meant to help narrow down the possibilities of what can be produced and create a clear approach. A doodle of a banana from the previous „Elaborate“ project should be iteration zero. The constraints were set in a chain of alterations that can be made. First, the shape can be changed, then the texture and at last the filling/colour. The three steps reset after every colour change and the chain starts from the beginning. The conditions are to only use the elements at hand without adding anything from outside. Also, with every step, there was the possibility to go back to the original shape, texture, or colour. Additionally, there was a time limit of maximum two minutes that can be spent with one alteration.
Executing the chain of constraints still left too much room for arbitrary changes.
The possibilities of altering the image after every step were still too indiscriminate to make sense. Besides learning how to work iteratively, the search for deeper meaning and purpose took over once again. The 100 images constructed out of banana doodle elements didn’t feel straightforward enough. The experimentation of what possibilities could arise from setting constraints to rearrange the same elements created a strong feeling of frustration and rejection towards the working method and type of work.
Even though the process didn’t work out as wished there have been some insights coming from the way the project was approached. Using the elements of a banana doodle to challenge the limits of what shape, texture and colour is still tied to a banana. Finding a new definition of what a banana is with every iteration. Through that, the banana iterations challenge the slipperiness of formal and semantic definitions. Also, the bananas challenge the meaning and possibilities of constraints within the design practice and how setting a framework can sometimes still lead to arbitrary outcomes. The project raises the question of how to set constraints that balance the fine line between openness, clarity and straightforwardness? Also, what place does intuition take on within a research design approach? To which degree is intuition reasonable?
Going further from this project the arbitrariness of the choices made within the constraints is something I want to eliminate from the approach. The framework should be set up clearer and more straightforward in the future. Looking at Raymond Queneau’s work „Exercises in style“ the constraints he set himself to rewrite the same story in several different styles is a good example of a balance between straightforwardness and still enough space to vary within the constraint. The possibility of variation is not within choosing the style but within the style itself. Whereas the 100 bananas still offer a broad range of different shapes, textures and colours that can be chosen from. So, the constraint always has to be set with a sense of direction or aim.
From looking at previous methods of working I identified that a process of collecting information and processing it, preferably with illustration, is the most natural way for me to interrogate a topic. An initial aim set at the beginning that is straightforward but also open is still a challenge. For me, it is important to have a topic or area of interest I can exhaust. The method of challenging common definitions is something I’m interested in but I still can’t connect it to a topic without overthinking the outcomes.

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