Abstract
Fabricating Culture to Communicate Across Deep-Time
The Human Interference Task Force was created in 1981 with one purpose: to find a way to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste sites (Sandia National Laboratories, 1993). Engineers, anthropologists, and science fiction writers were tasked with designing for deep-time. Today’s nuclear waste will remain deadly for 10,000 years, and only a highly considered and multi-dimensional communication strategy can ensure that our warnings are comprehensible (Anderson, 2005).
This project aims to contribute multimedia content for the insertion of the cultural myth known as the “Ray Cat Solution.” Proposed by French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri, this method entails breeding cats that change color in the presence of radioactive emissions to serve as a warning indicator to other life forms (Mars, 2014). The message to beware these glowing cats would then need to be ingrained into the collective culture through myths and legends.
Illustration, animation, and language – both fake and real – are combined in the body of this work in order to disseminate information about Ray Cats as understood by a fictional character from the future. By inventing names, stories, and history to support this imaginary situation with its imaginary cast, we can more closely evaluate what some of the success or pitfalls of the Ray Cat Solution might be. This work is entirely speculative, and may raise more questions than it answers. The final video hopes to deliver a dialogue between present and prospective societies and leads to further improved messaging strategies between the two.