Ospiti

Times and details to be announced CFP Bauer   From Lucian of Samosata’s Icaromenippus — already ironic about the extraterrestrial gaze — to Cyrano de Bergerac’s lunar voyages, literature has long imagined the problem of communicating with radical otherness.   In our own time, works such as Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (the source of Arrival) or Project Hail Mary show that the problem is not only linguistic, but cognitive, perceptual, even physical. The same is true of The Three-Body Problem, where communication is strategy, risk and systemic misunderstanding. On the scientific side, programmes such as the SETI Institute and METI International, together with academic reflection (Cabrol, Atri, Tarter), point to a paradox: we look for signals without really knowing what “meaning” might mean for another intelligence. A further critical layer follows: the very concept of intelligence on which these attempts rest reflects situated, often anthropocentric criteria. Operational definitions privilege capacities measurable by human parameters, while studies of distributed intelligence and non-symbolic cognition reveal radically different configurations. Intelligence metrics thus construct the conditions in which humans excel, making unstable the very concept they claim to measure. Communicating with the alien means abandoning the self-referential heuristics that pervade our idea of language. Current attempts to communicate with Heterocephalus glaber (radical eusocial organisation), ant colonies (distributed intelligence) or dolphins (complex but not human-symbolic cognition) make the point.   The project uses science fiction as a critical device to interrogate contemporary communication: what remains of design when shared culture, language and perception fall away?   The workshop is free. Maximum number of participants: 17 →Subscribe