Hi, welcome aboard. This spaceship is an art studio, a gallery, and a center for alien diplomacy. Congratulations, you’ve been selected to initiate communications with an alien race. They’re mute and don’t use sound to communicate, so they rely upon shapes and colors to express themselves.
Fortunately, your species has something called “painting” that will be an ideal medium for this method of communication. A room, or studio, has been prepared for you in which to work. You’ll find a blank canvas (or approximation thereof) on one wall and racks of guns on the other. That’s right: guns. Oh, don’t worry, this species doesn’t use them like yours does. They are wholly peaceful and the only thing they can conceive of using guns for is art. Or communication, which to them is the exact same thing.
These guns extrude substances analagous to your “paint”, but they do not merely produce swathes of a single flat color; they shoot procedurally generated colors, tanalogousnd patterns that mimic the aliens’ most common modalities of expression. Every gun makes a different design, but you won’t know what it is until you start shooting.
There are a couple of ways you can approach this. You could systematically examine the results of every gun, and try to remember their properties—or even take notes—and then deliberately choose your tools. Or, you can embrace randomness and limitation like many artists and try and convey a mood or emotion with whatever you happen to grab off the wall. Either approach is equally valid.
When you exit the studio, you step into the circular gallery, where your latest creation will appear mounted on the wall, to be ogled and hopefully admired by your hosts. Some of your pieces will undoubtedly speak more meaningfully to them than others. Observe the crowd and see which ones attract the most attention, then try to imbue your subsequent works with similar qualities.
It will be hard to know if your audience is clearly receiving the intended content of each message, but hey, isn’t the same thing true of human speech?
You can name your own price for Joy Exhibition, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
2 comments