Pioneers’ Plaque
Pioneer Plaque: Photography and Camera
Luna and Lesley
Our pioneer plaque is about photography and the camera. When we were brainstorming about how we were going to communicate this to aliens. We cannot use letters, because our alphabet is a series of lines that we have learnt as human beings. If we were going to use the alphabet we would have to associate those words with certain actions. Since the eyes are one of the ways we communicate and read information, it was essential that we came up with something that is pictorial. This is the easiest way for someone to learn a language because you can make pictures of objects that are already in real life that we can see with our eyes like trees, humans etc; Once a pictorial image is formed, it is left to interpretation by the viewer so it was important for us to be very specific in the plaque that we make.
The approach that we took was of two ways. The first was to communicate function. Since we are using cameras Luna drew an image of how a camera works. The image drawn in red is of a box taking in light through a lens. The lines with arrows resemble light rays that are going through the lens and producing an image inside of the box. The light rays are coming from the sun. We can tell this is the sun because there is a solar system next with all of our planets next to it. So light comes from the sun and it is captured in this box. We can assume that these aliens know our solar system because they were capable of travelling to our planet. The planets are also colour coded to their actual colour. The image that was used is a tree. This is because it is a very common object on earth and it can be one of the things that can be used to identify earth because it is abundant and essential to our environment. Repetition of the image is essential in the process of photography because it shows that the image is being replicated or copied to create something that is separate. In the plaque you can see that the object travels into the box through light and it is turned upside down because light travels in a straight path. This very same object is then replicated and an image is formed.
The second approach was to communicate reason. Why is photography something that is relevant or important? In the image it was important for us to communicate that photography is a very human thing. You can see on the right of the plaque that there are two human figures. A long arrow comes from the solar system to the human figures to show that we inhabit the earth. There is also an arrow that directs the image of the tree to us humans to show that it is for us. On the top of the plaque there is a picture frame and a book. This is supposed to represent memory. Documentation is one of the ways we can cast a view of memory and the aliens may be able to relate to this as they also do have a form of documentation themselves.