e a ARTeFACT t h
e a ARTeFACT t h “ This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. “
Voyager’s Golden Record holds within it all that is good and interesting about Earth. Even when the human race is gone and forgotten, the Golden Record will be Earth’s Artefact, it will be the fossil of earth that can be collected by another race. It can be seen as an optimistic reach for another species, to show we are not lonely in this Universe or it could be seen as a desperate need to not be forgotten. The human race is more selfish and evil than good, so why is it that Golden Record is trying to show that we are good. Isn’t this a lie? Isn’t it strange that our Governments chose what we should be represented as, instead of letting us represent ourselves? The only reason we consider ourselves intelligent life forms, is because we have yet to meet anyone smarter or more evolved. Instead we should send out a ‘Keep away’ sign, to warn them that we are not worth visiting. That we hate, fight and are corrupt enough to go to war and scam. On the other hand, it could be a cry for help. A race much smarter than us could see straight through our lies and depict, maybe they could help us stop going to war over resources that could be shared or help stop governments scamming their people of worthless pieces of paper that we, for some reason, value. We definitely need help. Yet, we may not be worth it.
So what does
Earth Arefact or
Golden Record mean?
flags representing Earth
Animation The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Typography Chemical Cloud
The Earth, our home planet, is a beautiful place. But we are destroying it. Pollution, toxins, chemicals all take an effect on our home. This font is called Chemical Cloud and tells a story within each letter. By looking at it, past the pollution and into the background, we can see a clear, crisp and untouched font, which in this case can be used to represent an untouched Earth. Moving to the foreground. A cloud appears. Looking at this letter A, the bottom right is pristine and untouched. As we move up a smokey, dark unknown substance clouds the letter. Much like a smoke chimney. It moves around to create these colour, which are beautiful, but also symbolize the unnatural, synthetic destruction of this letter. Naturally we would not see these colours, but when manipulated and disturbed these colours immerge.
Typography This font could just as easily fit into the Iconography section, but seems to fit into Typography better because it is conveying a language. Frankly, if I’m being honest, the art style is the only thing that made me like this. The relation of letter and image makes no sense. The T is a lamp and the S are some leaves. So the connection wouldn’t help anyone, not even an alien race, understand our world any better. If any improvement could be made on this font, it would be to create a better connection between our language and objects. Maybe even using the words he has created to portray something, instead of just using single letters.
Typography Semiotics
This set of images relates closely to style of semiotics that I have learnt in the Theory in Practice lectures. Anthony Burrill’s ‘Oil And Water Do Not Mix’ campaign/set of posters. By using Oil, found on the beaches of an oil spill, as the ink he has created a poster which shows the Icon and Index of semiotics. The same concept has been achieved in
Iconography The lowercase and capital latin letters are the main space icons: spaceships, satellites and other unified flying objects, Moon- and Mars-cars, space characters and planetariums. You can find the whole solar system, when you start typing the numbers. Just start typing the punctuations and you will get shooting stars in different styles.
Iconography dell Most of the icons to be developed had to represent very specific concepts. Many of them were also very abstract. They were easily able to create an identity with simple icons and to give a recognisable character to them that would be unmistakable, which is what I need to reproduce.
Iconography Hieroglyphs
The Egyptian Hieroglyphs is among the old writing system in the world. There is no identifiable precursor. It was once thought that the origin of Egyptian Hieroglyphs are religious and historical, but recent developments could point to an economical impetus for this script as well as push back the time depth of this writing system. The determinative is a glyph that carries no phonetic value but instead is added at the end of a word to clarify the meaning of the word.
Idea 1
Idea 2
Idea 3
Earth is ruined This is the idea that the people of Earth, the population and not just the governments are reaching out themselves to tell the truth and not just the happy lies the people in charge tell. What wqould happen if a group such as Anonymous were able to hack into the Goldern Record files and tell the story of the people and the truth about the planet. The world is in debt, filled with war and famine, these are much more important than the songs, smiling faces or dancing that were on the orginal. If anything, we should be asking for help!
War
• shows that over 350,000 people have died due to direct war violence, and many more indirectly. • The US federal price tag for the Iraq war — including an estimate for veterans’ medical and disability costs into the future — is about $2.2 trillion dollars. The cost for both Iraq and Afghanistan/ Pakistan is going to be close to $4.4 trillion, not including future interest costs on borrowing for the wars. • interest payments could total about $1 trillion dollars by 2023, or over $7 trillion by 2053.
Hunger
• 805 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. • 13.5 percent of the population is chronically undernourished. • Around half of all pregnant women in developing countries are anemic. This causes approximately 110,000 deaths during childbirth each year.
Pollution • 14 billion pounds of garbage are dumped into the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic. • Approximately 40% of the lakes in America are too polluted for fishing, aquatic life, or swimming.
Economy •
$61 Trillion of debt
Development Storyboard