Category: “story of your life” by Ted Chiang

walkie-talkies has been around since World War II. it is one of those inventions that is incredibly wide-spread. me and my partner decided to try and create a plaque that could explain what this object is used for and how does it look. 

as for my plaque itself, i decided to depict the signal coming from one walkie-talkie to another as waves, cause I thought that is something that any creature with any sense of space of direction. even though the waves have a certain destination that they are flowing at, there is no embodiment of space. moreover, i believe that placing two faces on the left and right side of the “canvas” eliminated the necessity to explain how human body works. i decided not to highlight the fact that people hear with their ears or speak with their mouth (it can be seen however is not essential to the design).

speaking of the object, i figured that elaborating on the exact shape and how the system works is not necessary: the main point is that it receives and delivers the “waves”. i also highlighted the difference between two walkie-talkies by changing the second one’s color. this points out that there are, in fact, two objects that are involved in the process.

as for the depicted humans – or to be precise, their heads – i have chosen to use different skin colors and also leave just the outline of their faces in order to create as vague representation of human appearance as possible. this, in my opinion, is more representative of the variety of nationalities and races that we, as a humanity, have. furthermore, I illustrated different genders that is also contributing to this idea of depicting inclusivity. 

i believe that this plaque also does not have any relation to time or the way people speak. this also is supposed to give a freedom of interpretation to the aliens regarding the way people speak or comprehend information. this lack of definitive mechanism, i guess, is the best way to actually explain something. 

overall i am quite satisfied with my design, however there are some things that I could have done differently. for example, i could have depicted a whole human body so that the aliens understand how people look in their full height. moreover, I could have created an illustration of how the walkie-talkie is structured inside and how people are perceiving sounds. but that is a totally another story.

when reading this novella I was absorbed by the way one of the main characters – Dr Louis Baker – was trying to establish contact with the aliens and learn about their way of communicating. I found particularly interesting the fact that heptapods were experiencing events and how time worked for them: instead of perceiving life in a sequence of events and thoughts, they “felt” all the events at the same time, simultaneously. this drastically differs from the way humans experience life and reflects the difference between ours and their’s language.

as for the way their language is structured, for me it occurred to be somewhat similar to Chinese: chains of semagrams on a two-dimensional surface for written language and another language for speaking. although the key difference is that the spoken language does not have any reference to the written, whereas in all human languages, as far as I know, language that we write with always somehow relates to what we are saying. moreover, the pictographic language that heptapods used as the written way of communication was way more complex than Chinese as it embedded almost inconsistent grammar structures. 

speaking of the appearance they had that was described in the novella, heptapods have radically symmetrical features, including eyes pointing in all directions, which reflect their way of experiencing events in a non-sequential manner. there is no such thing for them as looking “forward” or “back”, which also refers to their way of communication in the written language as they follow the rules of their unique visual syntax. humans, in contrast, have an imperfect symmetry: though we all have a pair of eyes, arms, legs, ears, the two sides of our bodies are still not the same. we use our arms to point at things, express using common gestures and even our facial expression often conveys a variety of emotions. this change of body positions and face reflects the way we experience life as well: we live and think in a certain sequence. 

again, I would like to talk a bit more about the relationship with the future that these aliens had: their way of perceiving events was drastically different as it followed a non-sequential path. this made me think about if our brains can reach that level of awareness of both the future and present. I keep wondering how that ability could change our behaviour and the way we communicate our thoughts. but that is for another post.