Project description: create (draw the plaque and describe) your own Pioneer Plaque to explain a piece of human history to aliens in Story of Your Life.
We want to present this pioneer plaque on behalf of China. After discussion, we think the written language system in China can be counted as the most developed one. So we decided to utilize the Chinese Characters.
Introduction of Chinese Characters:
Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi (漢字) are one of the earliest forms of written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. Nearly one-fourth of the world’s population still use Chinese characters today. As an art form, Chinese calligraphy remains an integral aspect of Chinese culture.
There are 47,035 Chinese characters in the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), the standard national dictionary developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the precise quantity of Chinese characters is a mystery; numerous, rare variants have accumulated throughout history. Studies from China have shown that 90% of Chinese newspapers and magazines tend to use 3,500 basic characters.
Chinese characters have evolved over several thousands of years to include many different styles, or scripts. The main forms are: Oracle Bone Inscriptions (Jia Gu Wen 甲骨文), Bronze Inscriptions, (Jin Wen 金文), Small Seal Characters (Xiao Zhuan 小篆), Official Script (Li Shu 隸書), Regular Script (Kai Shu 楷書), Cursive Writing or Grass Stroke Characters (Cao Shu 草書), and Freehand Cursive (Xing Shu 行書).
Design Process: Finally we chose the four Chinese characters, respectively “家(family), 国(nation), 天下(the world)” It is from Daxue, and is used to provide guidance for people’s way of living a meaningful life. Besides aspiration, we want to expand to the meaning. 天下is not limited to the world but the whole universe. We define the four characters as a complete set demonstrating the alignment of their meaning. And the ultimate goal is to convey the message of peace and inclusiveness that we humans are willing to establish friendly relationship and will treat them equally just like ourselves.
Basically the logic is to separate the characters and regroup them into a new pattern. We also got some inspiration from seal cutting patterns. We mainly chose 篆书 and 金文. As we know, the aliens depicted by ted-chiang have simultaneous mode of consciousness, and they can perceive the information as a whole. So they can identify the elements with interpretation.
