Guests

Grafica Spoken is a circle of work composed mainly of humans, known for taking themselves very seriously and aimed at discussing the meaning of life and abstract speculation on concreteness. Among the heroic participants: B. Calza, G. Galli, T. Guariento, A. Lancia, C. Monaco, L. Perondi, G. Romagno, B. Scanferla, D. Menafra, G. Dalai, J. Pieretti, A. Carlotti, C. Di Paolo, L. Monti, G. Gatta, M.o delle Monache and counting

A TOOLKIT FOR COMMUNICATING WITH NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCES

23.10

Workshop curated by Luciano Perondi
Updated information and times CFP Bauer From Luciano di Samosata with Icaromenippo — who was already ironic about the extraterrestrial gaze — to Cyrano de Bergerac with lunar travel, literature has always imagined the problem of communication with radical otherness. In the contemporary, works such as Stories of Your Life (Ted Chiang, from which Arrival) or Project Hail Mary show that the problem is not only linguistic, but cognitive, perceptual and even physical. The same goes for The Three-Body Problem, where communication is strategy, risk, and systemic misunderstanding. On the scientific level, programs such as SETI Institute and METI International, together with academic reflection (Cabrol, Atri, Tarter), highlight a paradox: we look for signals without really knowing what "meaning" means for another intelligence. To this is added a further critical level: the concept of intelligence, on which these attempts are based, reflects situated and often anthropocentric criteria. Its operational definitions privilege capabilities measurable according to human parameters, while studies on distributed intelligence and non-symbolic cognitive forms highlight radically different configurations. Intelligence metrics thus end up building the conditions in which the human excels, making the very concept they intend to measure unstable. Communicating with the alien implies abandoning those egoreferenced heuristics that pervade our way of conceiving language. Current attempts at communication with Heterocephalus glaber (radical eusocial organization), ant colonies (distributed intelligence), or dolphins (complex but not symbolic cognition in the human sense) demonstrate this. The project uses science fiction as a critical device to interrogate contemporary communication: what remains of design when culture, language and shared perception leap? Maximum number of participants: 17, registration via CFP Bauer. The workshop is free.