My project – “Deep Space Dial Tone”-- is a “game,” or more specifically a piece of interactive poetry, that grapples with the task of extraterrestrial communication. The idea is based on a contrapuntal poem – a poem that can be read multiple ways. The premise of the game is that you’re on an alien planet at an alien listening post. You receive a garbled/scrambled radio message from Earth and you have to choose how to put the pieces of this message together. In reality, these choices of how to put the message together are really choices of how to navigate through the poem. I want the game to capture some of the questions that scientists searching for extraterrestrial life have to grapple with. How much of a complete crapshoot miracle is life in the first place? And then if you do somehow have extraterrestrial life, that evolves to be sufficiently intelligent, that has the same cultural drive towards the stars that we do – if all that somehow occurs – how do you know that they’re also listening and transmitting messages using radio waves, using the same frequency, using a comparable channel size, pointed in our direction? How do we recognize what we’re receiving as language and not just noise? How do we cope with the fact that, if we send out a message to a planetary system hundreds of lightyears away, we will not receive a message back in our lifetime? How do you get both the money/resources AND the continuous capturing of the cultural imagination to keep listening in the face of all that?
play the game here