Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Radio Signal Spawns 'Alien' Art

Though promising as an example of an extraterrestrial transmission due to its repetition, frequency and increasing strength, the signal was discarded as an anomaly and the hype surrounding it was dismissed by many experts in the field, including SETI@home chief scientist Dan Wertheimer.

"There are a lot of people that got interested in this signal when we first reported it," says Wertheimer. "We ourselves were not that interested in it."

In 2005, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats revisited the signal as part of research for a nascent project on extraterrestrial life. Keats' previous projects include copyrighting his brain, attempting to genetically engineer God, and taking a hundred-year-long exposure of a San Francisco hotel room.

(Via The Anomalist.)


And here's a significant quote from a related article cited by Unknown Country:

"If I were an extraterrestrial trying to communicate with beings elsewhere in the universe, I certainly wouldn't transmit something they already knew," he argues. "I'd try to express something about myself, as profound as possible, in the most universal language I could imagine: I'd send art."

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