Pioneer Plaque
–emopod
By Mia & Orriz Date：10/11/2020
Ever since we read the book “Story of your life”, we’ve been longing to impart a piece of human history back to the Aliens. To make it more convenient for them to understand, we decided to create a new form of a written communication system called Emopods. According to the research on the language of Heptapods concluded in the book, this language was quite different from that of humans, whose logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion, but sticking together into a giant conglomeration as a circle (1). As a result, our self-created writing system adopted that writing style: every “word” of the sentence is arranged in a circle, which could enable Heptapods to read them with great ease. Furthermore, writings of Heptapods have distinct characteristics suggesting it was reminiscent of primitive sign systems (2). Therefore, we chose emoji as the main component (by which functions as words in human language) constructing our new communication system. It has something to do with the fact that emoji, as a universal sign language, could be mostly interpreted by all people around the world, even though they did not share the same language or culture. Emoji exists in various genres: it not only consists of facial expressions, but also common objects, places and types of weather, and animals, etc. In our opinion, emoji is a kind of sign that can be on behalf of our human intelligence. However, Emopods was not totally similar to emojis used in our daily life: they adopted a similar form as the Heptapod B. As mentioned in the story, Heptapod B was written in the form of a circle, and it was written by Heptapods with ease as if they already knew where each stroke shall be supposedly placed. Strokes in Heptapod B eventually formed a circle, so we made our Emopods more compressed conterminous. We believe that to tell our piece of history in such a way would be more comprehensible for Heptapods.
The piece of history we’re trying to tell Heptapods is the notorious Boston Massacre. Before converting this story into Emopods, it is necessary for us to sort out its basic outline. Rather than demonstrating the exact data of casualty or the historical standing of this event, we adopt a way that’s more like storytelling, even if such a simple form might somehow puzzle the Aliens. We chose a set of emojis and arrange them in linear order initially; then, we sketch the outlines of each emoji, simplify their pattern, and soften their edges and corners, in order to make them more like unwitting writings rather than ostentatious paintings; the next step is to arrange these shapes into a circle in sequence (even if the sequence doesn’t matter to them, it’s still OUR characteristics for them to learn); afterward, use several brushes and strokes to create the Emopods on the basis of former outlines. Thus, a piece of Emopods is created. Simply from its appearance, Emopods looks very similar to Heptapod B; this is because we deliberately design Emopods into a similar form which (we believe) could help Heptapods to understand. The brush we chose is a Chinese calligraphy brush because we think Heptapodic philosophy that “the beginning is the end, the effect is the cause” matches with the circulation of Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy.
Works Cited
[1]Ted Chiang, Story of your life, 2000