Evan Pan

Resonance

Evan Pan, Resonance, Odyssey 

Resonance by Odyssey is the song you listen to when you are driving down an empty freeway with a vibrant cityscape on the horizon. Albeit lyricless, the song uses electronic vibrations, reverb, and sounds to bring forth emotions of nostalgia, science fiction, and a general feeling of relaxation and hope for the future. As a result, I decided my piece needed to reflect the very same feeling. I incorporated mostly Gesalt’s concepts of similarity and proximity. The letter road extending into the horizon used the concept of proximity as it continued to grow smaller and smaller. The city on the horizon uses sameness in order to produce a buildings after buildings effect.

Finding the perfect font on Illustrator to match the cyberpunk feel of the song was rather impossible so I scoured the internet until I was satisfied. Then I started off the process by building the long road into the horizon as it was both my foreground and midground. I achieved the symmetry and gesalt principles by drawing a an isoceles triangle and then fitting the words in to build the tiles of the road. From there, I created the vehicles using the letter O and D and then the buildings in the background.

If I were to improve the project, I would certainly remove the rings revolving the road as they disrupted the feel of the road and took away from the main message of the piece (forward into the future). I would also fill in the empty spaces around the piece in order to even expand on the awespirng scale of the work.

 

Wechat is China’s predominant all-in-one super app. However, it is clear that the aliens are likely unfamiliar with software and the mobile devices that us humans depend on so much. Assuming that the aliens have already encountered the original pioneer plaque, they would already be familiar with our physiology. We started the design of the Wechat pioneer plaque by fitting the man and woman displayed on the original pioneer plaque with cellphones. This gives the aliens a sense that the average human is fitted with one of these devices. We then proceeded to design a close-up of the device with the Wechat logo and a globe behind, signifying collectiveness and the sense of “whole” that the aliens are so familiar with. At this point, we assume that the aliens understand circles to represent a “whole” due to their logogram based language. However this leads the Wechat logo to be a mystery.

In order to represent the super-app concept of Wechat and define Wechat for what it does for humanity, we drew four more circles connecting to the logo. Going clockwise, the bubble on the top right represents the food delivery that you can do with Wechat, drawing multiple common food items found on Earth in an attempt to represent the sustenance that Wechat can provide. Moving on, the next bubble portrays the monetary and financial aspects of Wechat. The concept of money and currency may not exist in the world of the Heptapods, but the concept of exchange must exist. That is why the arrows going back and forth may be the most important part of the bubble. However exchange is an aspect that could be connected back to causality which may be difficult for the aliens to understand. Continuing on, the third bubble depicts China, with points A and B and an arrow connecting them. This represents transportation and how Wechat is able to provide taxi rides, train tickets, and flights for people. The vehicles on Earth are certainly unfamiliar to the Heptapods, but transportation is best represented by going from point A to B. Last is communication. Communication is the main function of Wechat and there is no better way to represent communication than two faces talking to each other.

 

 

 

 

 

1. In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” Heptapods possess a unique language and communication style. Their spoken language appears to have a structure with nouns and verbs, but their writing system is non-linear, using intricate conglomerations of logograms. This fluid approach to writing reflects their different perception of time. As Dr. Louise Banks attempts to decipher it, she faces challenges due to its context-dependent nature. While the Heptapods, dubbed “Flapper” and “Raspberry,” cooperate in linguistic sessions, their writing suggests various implications about their technological advancements and cognition. Due to the Heptapod’s multi-directional nature their writing can be read from any direction unlike the human language which usually has an order of direction that must be maintained
2. Humans are four-limbed, bipedal, hairless mammals–all four features of which has significant impact on our methods of communication. For one, we use only half of our total limbs for basic ground movement, allowing our hands to express love by interlocking our fingers with someone else’s, anger by balling them into a fist, numbers by lifting and putting down specific fingers, and many more. The positioning of our faces and the lack of hair covering the entirety of it allows our facial expressions to be very clearly read by other members of our species