Yingjie Bei, Nicholas Bratton

elevator pitch: “With printed circuit boards, laser-cut aluminum paneling, and emojis we retell the story of the Tower of Babel through a technological, yet reminiscent, lens.”

Description

Babel 2015 is a sculptural retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel, originally found in the Book of Genesis. We use contemporary materials, symbology, and fabrication techniques to tell the story — a cautionary tale — of a people who share a single language and who strive to project themselves into the cosmos.

In contrast to the traditional paper medium of biblical stories, we use lasercut aluminum paneling and printed circuit boards which act doubly as a visual signifier of contemporary society and as an allusion to historical storytelling formats. The story itself is written in Emoji, which we see as a retrograde mode of communication. Interestingly, the use of Emojis is a technologically enabled return to a primitive logographic writing system. As fiction, we leave it up to the audience to decipher the presented imagery and to wonder what kind of future society might recover this artifact, and how they might contextualize it.

Classes

Circuit Design and Prototyping (4 points)