Sound installation - Courtenay, July 2026
GUDEMON
An old radio continuously broadcasts an emergency fiction inspired by The War of the Worlds, produced during La Chambre d’Écho residency at Chalet Twin Peaks.
A.L.I
Alien Language Interface
A.L.I is a research, documentation and creation workshop devoted to interstellar contact languages, proposed by David Guez, artist and author. It explores how a non-human intelligence might recognize a signal, understand a structure, interpret a pattern, receive an archive or answer a message.
The laboratory connects SETI, METI, exobiology, radio astronomy, information theory, cinema, literature, sound art and installations. Its purpose is to invent conceptual and artistic forms for making readable what might circulate between two worlds.
Projects / Works
Forms produced by the laboratory
A.L.I also produces objects, installations, dedicated interfaces and sound works developed from LABO research.
Experimental web application - A.L.I, 2026
Ghostbook Reader
Select or import two books, test whether the first book’s letters cross the second in the correct order, then observe that invisible reading as density, trajectory and key.
Art / science book - 543 pages
A.L.I — Opus 1
The laboratory becomes a physical book: an atlas of research, hypotheses, references and protocols devoted to interstellar languages. Deluxe edition available to order for €35 excluding shipping — Uncoated, Hardcover Case Wrap, Matte Cover.
LABO
Theme: noise
1 articles connect noise to the languages, forms of life and contact hypotheses explored by A.L.I.
31.07.2026
The Encoded Future Hypothesis: Is Tomorrow Already Among Us?
What if the future were not absent but distributed through the present as constraints, correlations and possibilities that remain unreadable? This hypothesis connects the philosophy of time, chaos, perception, information theory and the search for interstellar signals.
Audio
1 min 01
References
A shared field of sources
A living index of artworks, books, films, experiments and scientific sources that extend the questions raised by A.L.I.
Rudolf Laban — The Language of Movement
Laban choreutics treats movement as a geometric relation between the body and space.
Meditations on First Philosophy - René Descartes
Foundational text of methodical doubt, the cogito, and the modern problem of certainty.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence — Alan Turing
The foundational paper that replaces the question of thought with the imitation game.
Julian Huxley - Transhumanism
The text that popularised transhumanism, to be read alongside its eugenic context.
Lincos — Hans Freudenthal
The foundational design for a language intended to teach its own logic to an unknown cosmic recipient.
Dyson Spheres — Freeman Dyson
The foundational short paper proposing a search for artificial stellar sources through their infrared radiation.
Solaris - Stanisław Lem
Central novel on the impossibility of contact with an intelligence-planet.
Totality and Infinity — Emmanuel Levinas
The major work in which face, infinity, and responsibility place ethics before knowledge.
Subculture: The Meaning of Style — Dick Hebdige
A foundational study of style as an oblique language of resistance and recuperation.
Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia — Thomas A. Sebeok
A foundational report on redundancy, generational relay, and preserving meaning across ten millennia.
William Forsythe — Improvisation Technologies
An audiovisual grammar that makes the dancer’s virtual lines, rotations and inscriptions visible.
Binary Steles — David Guez
A series materialising the binary code of human works on stone, mosaic, paper, and other durable media.
The Malleability of Memory — APA
An accessible overview of memory reconstruction and Elizabeth Loftus’s research.
The Art of Language Invention — David J. Peterson
A complete method for phonological, grammatical, and historical language construction by the creator of Dothraki.
Other Minds — Peter Godfrey-Smith
A philosophical and scientific investigation of octopuses, evolution, and the independent emergence of consciousness.
News - Julie Elie and zebra finches
Work awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle Prize on zebra finch calls and their categories of meaning.
Voynich Manuscript - Beinecke MS 408
Illustrated codex held at Yale whose text remains largely unsolved.
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge - George Berkeley
Major work of immaterialism: the world is thought from perception rather than independent matter.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals - Charles Darwin
A historical landmark for thinking continuity between animal expression, body, emotion, and sign.
I and Thou — Martin Buber
A philosophy of dialogue opposing I-Thou encounter to the instrumental I-It relation.
Aelita — Yakov Protazanov
A Martian signal and a Constructivist world project revolution, desire, and power into space.
Samizdat: Unofficial Soviet Literature
The reader becomes copyist, carrier, and the text’s survival infrastructure.
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis — Alan Turing
A reaction-diffusion model explaining the emergence of biological patterns.
Trisha Brown — Roof Piece
Movement relayed from rooftop to rooftop turns the city into a channel of gestural transmission.
Solaris - Andrei Tarkovsky
Major film where extraterrestrial contact becomes memory, apparition, and inner landscape.
The Klingon Dictionary — Marc Okrand
The grammar and lexicon that turned cinematic material into a learnable language.
WIPP Markers — Sandia National Laboratories
The multidisciplinary study behind Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, and layered communication.
Creating False Memories — Roediger and McDermott
The modern foundational study of the DRM paradigm and semantic false recall.
Astrolinguistics — Alexander Ollongren
A modern continuation of logic-based languages designed for interstellar communication.
Paper Hard Drive — David Guez
The complete binary code of a film printed in a book and reconstructible through open software.
My Octopus Teacher — Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed
A documentary about sustained attention, learning, and the relationship between a diver and a wild octopus.
UCSF-Berkeley Speech Brain-Computer Interface
An experimental interface decodes speech intentions and drives a digital voice and avatar.
Project Hephaistos II — Dyson sphere candidates
A Gaia DR3, 2MASS and WISE analysis of millions of sources, retaining seven follow-up candidates without presenting them as evidence.
Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent in the Voynich Manuscript
Preprint on graphic and material signs of scribal intent in Voynich; it does not offer an accepted decipherment.
Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The private language problem clarifies the need for shareable rules if a sign is to become language.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Don Siegel
Contact becomes silent replacement, a crisis of trust, and a reversible political metaphor.
Radio Caroline — Ross Revenge
Pirate radio as a physical and political displacement of the right to broadcast.
The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees - Karl von Frisch
Major reference on the bee dance as collective spatial code.
Steve Paxton — Contact Improvisation
A practice in which gravity, support, inertia and attention produce a physical conversation between bodies.
Stalker - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Zone functions as a place-message: it transforms desire, paths, and proof.
Minds, Brains, and Programs — John Searle
The Chinese Room thought experiment distinguishes syntactic manipulation from understanding.
Towards a Cosmic Language — Hans Freudenthal
Freudenthal revisits the cosmic-language project in the historic SETI magazine <em>Cosmic Search</em>.
Blade Runner — Ridley Scott
Implanted memories become part of the replicants’ identity infrastructure.
Living Detectors and Complementary Signs — Bastide & Fabbri
A semiotic hypothesis in which sensitive animals, stories, and songs transmit a radiation warning.
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis — Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec
A philosophical fable that uses a deep-sea cephalopod to build an inverted, radically other anthropology.
The Animal That Therefore I Am — Jacques Derrida
Derrida questions the animal gaze and the general category through which humans reduce living plurality.
Avatar — James Cameron
The film for which Paul Frommer designed Na’vi under performance, sound, and timing constraints.
WISE All-Sky — infrared map of the sky
The all-sky infrared survey that provides a major basis for searches for waste heat and infrared excess.
ZERO-UN Manifesto — David Guez
A manifesto on digital memory, natural media, and the material conditions of preservation.
WHO - Human Genome Editing Governance
International recommendations on safety, ethics and equity in genome editing.
Linear A Tablet from Hagia Triada
Minoan administrative tablet: the script is known, but the language behind Linear A is not.
2001: A Space Odyssey — Stanley Kubrick
The monolith and HAL shift contact toward evolution, AI, and the incommensurable.
Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The novel behind Stalker, where extraterrestrial traces are incomprehensible leftovers rather than human-readable messages.
Sun Ra — Space Is the Place
Alien origin as musical, political, and Afrofuturist fiction.
Reason, Truth and History - Hilary Putnam
The brain in a vat renews solipsistic doubt in a technological and semantic framework.
The Alex Studies - Irene Pepperberg
Foundational study on the cognitive and symbolic capacities of Alex the parrot.
The Rosetta Project
A microscopic archive of thousands of pages documenting human languages, designed for long-term legibility.
Sapphire Memory Disc — Andra
An experimental micro-engraved medium intended to preserve dense information on a durable material.
NASA - Robonaut 2
The first humanoid robot sent into space, designed to work alongside humans.
Game of Thrones — HBO
The series that turned George R. R. Martin’s Dothraki fragments into a dialogue language.
Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication — NASA
A collective volume on the cultural, anthropological, and interpretive challenges of interstellar contact.
The Imitation Game — Morten Tyldum
A popular biographical fiction about Turing, Bletchley Park, and Enigma, to be read alongside historical scholarship.
Blade Runner 2049 — Denis Villeneuve
Ana Stelline creates memories whose emotional truth exceeds their factual origin.
Tabby’s Star — dust and megastructure
A classic case of a brightness anomaly where the megastructure hypothesis was weakened by multi-wavelength data.
Mamari Tablet - rongorongo
One of the most studied rongorongo tablets; some sequences are discussed as a lunar calendar.
Merce Cunningham — LifeForms
Three-dimensional software separates choreographic composition from habitual bodily movement.
Total Recall — Paul Verhoeven
A fiction about manufactured memories, the desire for adventure, and the impossibility of certifying reality.
Clock of the Long Now
A monumental mechanical clock designed to embody and endure ten thousand years.
The Simulation Argument - Nick Bostrom
A contemporary hypothesis that reformulates doubt about the external world as a cosmological and computational possibility.
SCP Foundation
A collaborative fictional bureaucracy of the anomalous built by an online community.
Memory of Mankind
Archives engraved on ceramic and stored in a salt mine to transmit documents into the distant future.
Ex Machina — Alex Garland
The Turing test becomes an experiment in power, desire, embodiment, and manipulation.
Annihilation - Alex Garland
The Shimmer imagines otherness communicating through refraction, mutation, and biological rewriting.
Project CETI
Project using machine learning to analyze sperm whale codas and explore their communication.
Bachelor Machines - Manufacturing the Posthuman
Arnauld Pierre traces artistic myths of humanity hybridised with its machines.
ALMA — follow-up of infrared sources
A key instrument for separating dust, background galaxies and compact sources when infrared candidates need follow-up.
Solaris — Andrei Tarkovsky
An extraterrestrial ocean answers through human memories, making encounter and projection impossible to separate.
Space Is the Place - Sun Ra
Afrofuturist reference where music, cosmos, performance, and extraterrestrial origin merge.
Space Is the Place — Sun Ra
Afrofuturism turns cosmic exodus into a strategy of liberation and self-determination.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — Michel Gondry
Erasing a romantic memory transforms the very conditions of identity.
Earth Species Project
Organization developing open AI tools to study and decode animal communication.
Identified Flying Objects - Michael P. Masters
A speculative anthropological formulation of the future-human visitor hypothesis.
EXOST1 — David Guez
An archival object and transmission protocol tied to the passage of an interstellar body.
Large language models pass the Turing test — PNAS
A controlled study of conversational indistinguishability in selected large language models.
Eduard Artemyev - Tarkovsky soundtracks
Electronic landscapes where sound becomes threshold, presence, and voiceless thought.
Alien — Ridley Scott
First contact becomes forced reproduction, contamination, and conflict between organism and corporation.
Sperm whale phonetic alphabet - Nature Communications
Paper proposing a fine analysis of sperm whale codas: rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation.
Tinbergen's Four Questions
Ethological framework for analyzing behavior through function, mechanism, development, and evolutionary history.
They Live — John Carpenter
A satire in which invasion hides within advertising, money, and the commands of mass culture.
Konrad Lorenz - classical ethology
Historical reference in ethology, useful for placing animal signals within observed behavior.
Global Groove — Nam June Paik
Global television as synthetic flow, cultural collision, and plastic signal material.
Murmurs of Earth - Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Frank Drake, Jon Lomberg, Linda Salzman Sagan, Timothy Ferris
The central book on the making of the Voyager Golden Record: sounds, images, music and playback principles.
A Sign in Space - Daniela de Paulis / SETI Institute
A worldwide simulation of receiving an extraterrestrial message, inviting the public to test acts of decoding.
Pluribus
Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan about collectivity, shared consciousness and the ambiguity of common happiness.
The Last Pictures - Trevor Paglen / Creative Time
One hundred micro-engraved images attached to EchoStar XVI as a durable orbital archive.
How Not to Be Seen — Hito Steyerl
A mock tutorial on digital resolution, invisibility, surveillance, and image violence.
A Simple Response to an Elemental Message - Paul Quast and collaborators
A participatory interstellar message sent toward Polaris, centered on humanity’s environmental relation to Earth.
Codex Virtualis - Interspecifics / SETI x AI
An Ars Electronica / SETI residency imagining AI-generated hybrid organisms between microorganisms, algorithms and possible life.
Cogito in Space - Daniela de Paulis
A radio project turning brain waves into a signal sent into space, between neuroscience, radio astronomy and speculative telepathy.
Sónar Calling GJ273b - Sónar / METI International
A musical transmission toward exoplanet GJ273b: a coded, sonic and cultural message addressed to possible intelligence.
The Moon Goose Analogue - Agnes Meyer-Brandis
An installation and scientific fiction about moon geese, analogue habitats and lunar travel imaginaries.
Drosophila titanus - Andy Gracie
Bio-art and speculative astrobiology: fruit flies imagined for Titan, Saturn’s moon.
moonmeme - Liliane Lijn
A lunar text project: writing a word at cosmic scale and turning the Moon into a language surface.
Movement — Étienne-Jules Marey
A foundational work in which chronophotography decomposes human, animal and physical motion.
The Universal Library — Kurd Lasswitz
A foundational exploration of a total library produced by alphabetic combinatorics.
Contact - Carl Sagan
A key SETI novel about receiving a structured signal and the tensions between science, politics and belief.
Story of Your Life — Ted Chiang
A linguist learns a nonlinear writing system that changes her experience of time.
Ghosts in the Air Glow - Amanda Dawn Christie
A transmission artwork using HAARP to send images, voice and sound into the ionosphere.
We Come in Peace / Vi kommer i fred
A series imagining extraterrestrial contact through a fungal logic: spore, contamination, network and medium.
Timaeus — Plato
A cosmological dialogue in which a demiurge orders the world according to intelligible forms.
Ethics — Baruch Spinoza
God or Nature: an infinite, immanent reality rather than an external creator.
The Library of Babel — Jorge Luis Borges
A library containing every possible combination turns total knowledge into a labyrinth.
The Clock — Christian Marclay
A twenty-four-hour montage synchronised with real time, turning film history into a clock.
Arrival — Denis Villeneuve
Heptapod language reshapes lived causality and the boundary between memory and anticipation.
Orbital Reflector - Trevor Paglen
A satellite sculpture, orbital mirror and question about who may write signs in the sky.
The Ancient of Days — William Blake
Urizen measures the world with compasses, both creator image and critique of reason limiting infinity.
The Garden of Forking Paths — Jorge Luis Borges
A labyrinthine story in which every choice produces diverging times that may still intersect.
A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems — Raymond Queneau
Ten sonnets cut into strips generate 10 to the 14th potential poems.
24 Hour Psycho — Douglas Gordon
An extreme slowing of Psycho in which narrative becomes duration, waiting and material memory.
Free the Air - Tomás Saraceno
An immersive installation where vibrations, webs and bodies propose a haptic interspecies language.
Paintings for the Temple — Hilma af Klint
A vast abstract cycle conceived as a spiritual interface and map of invisible realities.
Paulina Peavy / Voice of Space
Paintings, performances and visionary cosmology tied to claimed communication with a UFO entity.
Minority Report — Steven Spielberg
Prediction turns a possible future into present political action and raises the problem of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Inception — Christopher Nolan
Each depth of dreaming possesses its own temporal dilation factor.
La Jetée — Chris Marker
The photo-film about memory and time becomes a printed binary sequence in the Paper Hard Drive.
Aus den sieben Tagen — Karlheinz Stockhausen
Texts for intuitive music in which performers understand themselves as receivers rather than mere executants.
Arrival — Denis Villeneuve
Circular writing reshapes the experience of time and the structure of the message itself.
Making Contact - SETI Artists in Residence / NUMU
A group exhibition of SETI Artists in Residence, including Rachel Sussman’s Cosmic Microwave Sand Mandala.
data-verse — Ryoji Ikeda
An installation that turns immense scientific datasets into a visual and sonic perceptual field.
Train Arriving at Perrache — Lumière Company
The real outer world used in the temporal-screen test film.
A Void — Georges Perec
A complete novel written without the letter e, in which a missing sign organises the narrative world.
WMAP — Mapping Primordial Light
The mission turns minute temperature differences into a map of conditions in the early Universe.
SETI Artist-in-Residence Program
An artist residency program at the intersection of space research, imagination and public engagement.
A Trip to the Moon — Georges Méliès
The inner film accelerated during capture and restored to normal pace by slowing the whole shot.
Moon Museum - Forrest Myers and associated artists
A tiny artwork allegedly sent to the Moon: archive, secrecy and cultural trace.
Ghostbook Reader — David Guez / A.L.I
An application that verifies, measures and visualises the ordered presence of one book inside another.
Ghostbook Cube — David Guez / A.L.I
A cubic installation where rotations, permutations and luminous paths reveal several ghost books inside one letter matrix.
Story of Your Life - Ted Chiang
An essential text about first-contact linguistics, non-human writing and the effects of language on thought.
Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard synthesizes her research on forests, mother trees and mycorrhizal networks.
Rare Earth - Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
An essay on the hypothesis that complex life may be rare, useful for balancing astrobiological optimism.
Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake explores fungi as forms of relation, metabolism, network and non-human perception.
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
A major Martian reference: invasion, technological otherness, human fragility and the modern imaginary of civilizations from Mars.
The Search for Life in the Universe - Donald Goldsmith and Tobias Owen
A broad introduction to the astronomical, chemical and biological conditions of the search for life.
The Overstory
Richard Powers’ novel in which trees become characters, archives and actors of the living collective.
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
An essential literary cycle on Mars as cultural mirror: colonization, nostalgia, human projection and traces of another civilization.
The Eerie Silence - Paul Davies
A reflection on SETI, cosmic silence, search strategies and the consequences of detection.
On Learned Ignorance - Nicholas of Cusa
A decisive text for thinking a cosmos not centered on humans and the possibility of inhabitants of other worlds that cannot be judged from our own categories.
On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds - Giordano Bruno
A major text in the plurality-of-worlds tradition: the universe no longer has a single center and may contain innumerable worlds.
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds - Fontenelle
A classic that makes the plurality of inhabited worlds accessible through conversation, between astronomy, imagination and philosophy.
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens - Immanuel Kant
Kant places the possibility of inhabitants of other planets within a general cosmology, speculative but fertile for thinking intelligence elsewhere.
Of the Plurality of Worlds - William Whewell
An important critique of inhabited worlds: useful for thinking about evidence and the risk of human projection.
The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds - Camille Flammarion
A major popular astronomy work that spread the idea of lives adapted to other worlds.
Plurality of Worlds - Steven J. Dick
A long historical study of the debate over inhabited worlds, from antiquity to the modern age.
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 - Michael J. Crowe
A reference work on how science, theology and philosophy debated extraterrestrial life.
On the Nature of Things - Lucretius
Poetic atomism: if the same elements combine elsewhere, Earth may not be the only stage for life.
Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links - John Archibald Wheeler
Foundational text in which Wheeler develops the It from Bit intuition: physical facts as informational answers.
Axiomatic - Greg Egan
A hard-SF short-story collection that frames Egan's speculative logic: cognition, mathematics, identity and formal systems.
It from Qubit - Simons Collaboration
Research program on the links between quantum information, entanglement, gravity and the emergence of spacetime.
Programming the Universe - Seth Lloyd
A major essay popularizing the idea of the universe as physical computation and information processing.
The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli’s essay undoing the idea of a single universal time by linking relativity, entropy, memory and lived experience.
Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
A foundational text for thinking across dimensions: a sphere crossing a 2D world helps imagine a 4D message received in 3D.
Solaris - Andrei Tarkovsky
Film adaptation of Solaris: extraterrestrial intelligence acts as a mirror of human memory and desire.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Elysian Kingdom
Season 1 episode 8: the Enterprise crosses a nebula whose cosmic entity is associated with a Boltzmann brain.
Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad - Sean M. Carroll
Cosmology paper using Boltzmann brains as a critical test for models of the universe.
The Perceptron - Frank Rosenblatt
Foundational perceptron paper as a probabilistic brain-inspired model.
Glory - Greg Egan
A short story of exomathematics where distant civilizations encounter radically different mathematical structures.
Perceptrons - Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert
Critical book on the limits of simple perceptrons.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang
A major novella about artificial intelligences that grow, learn, form attachments and develop forms of language and relation.
DishBrain - in vitro neurons and Pong
Experiment coupling cultured neurons to a minimal game-like environment.
Solaris - Stanisław Lem
An essential reference on radically other intelligence: not a language to translate, but an alterity that exceeds our categories.
Organoid intelligence - biocomputing
Research proposal on organoids as supports for biological computing.
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
HAL 9000 as a cultural figure of artificial self-monitoring turned unsettling.
The Culture Minds - Iain M. Banks
In the Culture series, Minds are civilizational, diplomatic and strategic AIs: they shift language toward mediation.
What Is Life? - Erwin Schrödinger
A foundational book that frames life as a carrier of molecular order and transmissible information.
Solaris - Stanisław Lem
The intelligent ocean as a mirror of human memory and conditions of thought.
Directed Panspermia - Crick & Orgel
A speculative scientific paper proposing that an advanced civilization could have intentionally seeded other worlds.
Life Itself - Francis Crick
A book in which Francis Crick develops the idea of a possible cosmic origin of life and popularizes directed panspermia.
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
A contemporary novel using panspermia and extraterrestrial biology as engines for communication and survival.
Metacognition and cognitive monitoring - John H. Flavell
Foundational text on knowledge and control of cognitive processes.
Rhesus monkeys know when they remember - David Hampton
Important study on animal metacognition and uncertainty responses.
Riding the Crocodile - Greg Egan
A story about the time scale of galactic communication and the waiting imposed by light speed.
Rosetta Stone — Three Scripts for One Decree
The Decree of Memphis, inscribed in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, provided the decisive internal translation for decipherment.
Linear B — PY Ta 641
An administrative tablet from Pylos showing how an unknown system can be approached through regularities, constraints and testable predictions.
The Decipherment of Linear B — John Chadwick
A methodical account of the work of Alice Kober, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, combining statistics, linguistic hypotheses and archaeological confirmation.
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes explores cognitive enhancement and its effects on identity, relationship and solitude.
Understand - Ted Chiang
Augmented intelligence reaches levels of thought that become mutually unreadable.
Limitless
The pharmacological fantasy of instant access to near-unlimited cognitive power.
Ghost in the Shell
Memory, identity and cognition become permeable to networks and artificial bodies.
Umwelt - GMEM
Mixed work for electronics, two percussionists and six vibratory loudspeakers, by Bertrand Wolff, François Rossi and Damien Ravnich.
A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans - Jakob von Uexküll
Foundational text for the notion of Umwelt: each living being inhabits its own world of signs.
A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze and Guattari
Central work for the notions of rhizome, assemblage, multiplicity and becoming.
UNESCO - Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa
Official UNESCO record for the Nazca and Palpa lines and geoglyphs.
The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells novel that shaped the modern imaginary of Martian invasion and collective panic.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The black monolith as a mineral, silent and programmatic object: a form that acts without translating its intention.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Thomas Nagel
Philosophical essay on the irreducibility of non-human subjective experience.
The War of the Worlds - Orson Welles
Radio adaptation famous for turning fiction into a media event.
The Crystal World
J. G. Ballard's novel in which the world crystallizes: the inorganic becomes transformation, beauty and threat.
Annihilation - Alex Garland
Cultural reference in which contact transforms environments, bodies and perceptions.
Stones / The Writing of Stones
Roger Caillois reads stones as natural images: a theory of form without human authorship.
La Chambre d’Écho
Sound arts and literature residency at Chalet Twin Peaks, Courtenay, July 19-30, 2026.
Biosemiotics and sensory ecology
Research field useful for thinking signs before human language.
Lithophones and sounding stones
Stone instruments in which mineral matter becomes voice, rhythm and sonic alphabet.
The Fourth Dimension - Jean Painlevé
A poetic educational film about the fourth dimension, slices, projections and the difficulty of seeing beyond our space.
Murchison meteorite
A carbonaceous meteorite famous for organic compounds, often cited in debates on prebiotic chemistry and panspermia.
Aâma — Frederik Peeters
An environmental intelligence reconfigures life, bodies and evolution beyond the classic sender-receiver model.
ʻOumuamua
First interstellar object observed in the Solar System: a limit case for thinking of stellar objects as archive, anomaly or possible sign.
Arzach — Moebius
Almost wordless fables in which readers learn the regularities of a world without receiving instructions.
The Arrival — Shaun Tan
A silent narrative that makes readers experience arrival in a world whose writing, species and customs are unknown.
Watchmen — Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
A manufactured extraterrestrial appearance becomes a geopolitical speech act with global consequences.
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Contact without human language, based on object, evolution, mystery and radically other intelligence.
Difference and Repetition - Gilles Deleuze
Major text for thinking difference beyond models of identity and resemblance.
Ambassador of the Shadows — Christin and Mézières
Point Central imagines interstellar diplomacy among species that share neither one environment nor one culture.
Antikythera mechanism - Nature
Major scientific paper on the structure and function of the ancient astronomical calculator.
L’Origine — Marc-Antoine Mathieu
The story turns panel, page and book into metaphysical operators acting upon the character’s world.
S.E.N.S. — Marc-Antoine Mathieu
A wordless graphic novel and walk-through installation in which direction, space and the reader’s body become language.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - Steven Spielberg
A direct reference for the luminous finger: contact as bodily gesture, fingertip light and an emotional imagination of signal.
Voynich Manuscript - Beinecke Library
Presentation of the Yale manuscript, a central example of an organized but undeciphered book.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Steven Spielberg
First contact through motifs, tones, light and repetition: a sensory grammar of encounter.
A New Philosophy of Society - Manuel DeLanda
Contemporary development of assemblage theory after Deleuze.
La Soupe aux choux - Jean Girault
A rural first-contact comedy where signal passes through body, gas, food, hospitality and misunderstanding.
Thomas S. Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
A central book for thinking about paradigm shifts and changes in scientific worldviews.
Contact - Robert Zemeckis
Radio signal, decoding, machine, scientific proof and individual experience.
Parables for the Virtual - Brian Massumi
Deleuzian account of affect, movement, intensity and the virtual.
Khipu Database Project - Harvard
Research database on Andean quipus as textile data systems.
Bruno Latour — We Have Never Been Modern
A theory of hybrid networks linking science, society, instruments and narratives.
Johann Sebastian Bach — The Art of Fugue
A musical architecture in which one motif generates a world of transformations.
Alan Turing — computation, machine, morphogenesis
A rupture connecting logic, machines, artificial intelligence and pattern formation in life.
District 9 - Neill Blomkamp
A political and bodily approach to contact: alienness, fear, language, contamination and colonial relations.
The Posthuman - Rosi Braidotti
Posthuman continuation of Deleuze around non-anthropocentric subjectivities.
NASA Technosignatures Workshop Report
Reference report on technosignatures and the search for non-human technological indicators.
Interstellar - Christopher Nolan
Habitability, survival, transmission, fictional fifth dimension and cosmic time.
Arrival - Denis Villeneuve
A key film for A.L.I: linguistic protocol, circular signs, translation, misunderstanding and non-human temporality.
Disclosure Day - Steven Spielberg
A recent fictional reference where media speech is rewritten as mathematical and semiological notation.
Arecibo Message
An iconic radio message composed as a binary image: numbers, chemistry, DNA, human figure, planets and telescope.
Voyager Golden Record
An archive object sent beyond the Solar System: sounds, images, music and greetings as a terrestrial self-portrait.
Chilbolton / Arecibo Reply Crop Circle
A famous crop-circle pattern because it appears to replay and alter the structure of the Arecibo message.
Ummo Affair / Ummite Letters
A UFO archive of letters, symbols, invented vocabulary and documentary strategies around an alleged civilization from Ummo.
Wow! Signal / 6EQUJ5
A radio trace turned cultural icon: a brief, unrepeated signal transformed into a sign by the 6EQUJ5 annotation.
Drake Equation
A tool-formula that turns the question of communicating civilizations into discussable parameters and a research program.
Euler's Identity
A mathematical relation condensing circle, wave, phase, exponential and complex numbers: a possible formal kernel for A.L.I.
Five-tone Motif - Close Encounters of the Third Kind
A sound and light sequence that became a cultural model of contact: five pitches, repetition, response and translation into light.
Morse Code, Ships - Voyager Golden Record
A Golden Record sound excerpt used on the homepage: Morse as minimal rhythm, archive and human cultural signal.
Moonlight Sonata / Earth-Moon-Earth - Katie Paterson
Moonlight Sonata translated into Morse, sent to the Moon, reflected back and replayed with the losses of the journey.
A.L.I Guttural Phonemes
A set of sound excerpts created to explore breath, glottis, uvular friction and vibration as a possible prelinguistic layer.
France Culture - Philosophy and the Plurality of Worlds
An episode of Les Chemins de la philosophie on plurality of worlds, linking cosmology, metaphysics and human decentering.
France Culture - Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
An episode centered on Fontenelle, useful for understanding how life elsewhere becomes an accessible thought experiment.
France Culture - Carl Schmitt and Immanuel Kant among Extraterrestrials
A contemporary entry point into the political and philosophical issues raised by extraterrestrial contact.
France Culture - Extraterrestrials: Are There Other Forms of Life in the Universe?
A France Culture archive on the question of life elsewhere in the universe.
La Simulation
Loïc Hecht's essay on the simulation hypothesis and its contemporary philosophical implications.
Le Vertige
Quentin Dupieux animated film connected to characters discovering the simulated nature of their world.
The Matrix
Major popular culture reference on simulated worlds, code and awakening beyond the interface.
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom's paper formalizing the contemporary probabilistic simulation argument.
The Stanley Parable
Video game about free will, narration, obedience and a character becoming aware of the system directing him.
Grand Theft Auto V
Open-world video game used here as a cultural example of simulation, agents and emergent behavior.