The technology we choose is photography, and we are going to use a diagram to present it for the aliens.

The scene of taking photo is shown in the middle. In detail, there is a person standing, and another one standing in his lower right corner, holding a camera towards him.A dotted line starts at the screen of the camera and connects it with a square, in which there is a person in the same position as the person who is being shot. Everything in the square is just same as things around the model, which means that this is a technology that can record things vividly.

Then, we want to show them the tool we use to photograph. We use an arrow pointing the camera to the top left corner, where there are two bigger pictures of camera. One is complete, and the other one is a cutaway view, presenting under the complete one, in order to illustrate the inner part of a camera. Around the second one are some smaller pictures showing the structure and principle of some indispensable components, which are, the view finder, the shutter, and the pentaprism.

For the viewfinder, there is a line representing the light, and after crossing some lens, it was 90 degree reflected by a retroreflector and at the end of line there is a shape of an eye. It aims to show that thanks to the viewfinder, a photographer can check the view in the photo before taking a real one. The shutter is composed by a mechanical switch, a big gear, a smaller gear and a flap, and all these things are connected by three mechanical arm. When a photographer presses the shutter, it will drive the whole system, the mechanical arm will shrink and the the the flap will open. The pictures are presenting together with one’s flap open and the other one’s closed. As for the pentaprism, we want to draw its plane diagram, so that we can show how the light was reflected.

The right part of the diagram illustrates the core principle of photography，the puncture forming picture. There is a stick figure person standing to the right side, two arrows starting at his head and feet respectively, which represent the path of light. The arrows converge through one point until they get lens, which is drown a little behind the point, and they become two parallel lines. The lines reach the Charge Coupled Device and form an exact same image, except being inverted. This is how a camera works to catch a image.

Finally, in the blank part at the bottom of the picture, there are some example photos showing the genres of photography, arranged from left to right. The first one is some apples, which means Still life photography. The second one is a photo of a person, which is, undoubtedly, Portrait photography. The third one is Landscape photography, and the forth one, is an image that has been distorted abstractly, which means that there are some methods to modify a picture to achieve some art effect, which someone calls Art photography.

Since the aliens have a simultaneous mode of consciousness, we mean to avoid anything about time, so they won’t be confusing about the time line.

A.Yongxin Li, Divenire, Ludovico Einaudi

B.The whole concept behind this picture is evolvement. The music is composed by many sets of changing, like the climb of the scale, or the strength and weakness of the piano. It feels like something that is experiencing a process of evolvement.Though it sometimes feels hesitating and afraid, it keep going to the destination, no matter the result is good or bad. The process means much more than the ending, and ta the ending, no matter what will happen, it will face it peacefully.

So I create some sets of evolvment as well. To make each set more clear, I used Gestalt Theory Similarity most. And I also use some continuity in the top and left sets. Most the the characters I used was cursive English Characters so that it looked more fluent and can the audience can feel a sense of movement.

C.I have recreate my poster for many times, and the first version was totally different from this one, from the understanding to the music to the poster’s looking. My biggest failure was that at first my poster was even too simple to be considered as a finished one. And the most significant success I think is the combination of T, V and the repetition of o. I used this combination to create the effect of dripping.

D.I will learn more about how to use illustrator and consider the balance of composition. And I will use more Gestalt theory if possible.

Yongxin Li-9

1.

• The aliens’ writing language are different from their speaking language. In their language. one grammar has two dimension. It’s guessed that writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one.
• The writing system of the aliens is a semasio-graphic writing system. It conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds.
• Though the spoken language of the aliens has no written punctuation, its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined. There was no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences.
• Word order meant next to nothing in their speaking language. Also, There was no preferred order when reading the semagrams in a sentence.
• They already know what they will hear or say before a conversation. However, language is still necessary for them as a form of action.

2.

    ①The aliens has a simultaneous mode of consciousness. They are aware of thongs happened in the past, right now, and in the future at the same time. Therefore, speech is a bottleneck for them because it requires that one word follow another sequentially. So they has developed a different writing system that the order of words don’t make sense. It shows how the consciousness influence the way of communication.

   ② For human beings, someone deaf or mute can use some sign language to communicate, such as ASL that is mentioned in the novel.