Babel fish
Nelli Kamaeva Victor Tyapkov Irina Kruglova
Poster
Named for the babel fish — a perfectly organized act of communication, written in invented scripts, that no one can actually read.
Named for the babel fish, the universal translator of the imagination, this one plays a joke straight: a perfectly organized act of communication that nobody can decipher. Meaning is promised on every line and delivered on none.
It's laid out like a message to the stars. Against a night-sky background, glowing stacked ovals rise like a signal or a ziggurat of sound, each carrying a paragraph written in invented, undecipherable scripts; a yellow beam projects down onto a small painted landscape of snowy mountains, lakes and tiny Tibetan villages, with satellite-like nodes anchoring the broadcast and a strip of fake postage stamps and neat annotations completing the Arecibo-style look.
Everything about it says "here is information" — in languages that don't exist.
Named for the babel fish, the universal translator of the imagination, this one plays a joke straight: a perfectly organized act of communication that nobody can decipher. Meaning is promised on every line and delivered on none.
It's laid out like a message to the stars. Against a night-sky background, glowing stacked ovals rise like a signal or a ziggurat of sound, each carrying a paragraph written in invented, undecipherable scripts; a yellow beam projects down onto a small painted landscape of snowy mountains, lakes and tiny Tibetan villages, with satellite-like nodes anchoring the broadcast and a strip of fake postage stamps and neat annotations completing the Arecibo-style look.
Everything about it says "here is information" — in languages that don't exist.
Babel fish
Nelli Kamaeva
