Astronomy Center Rijeka, Croatia
Light installation for the UNESCO International Day of Light
May 16th – May 18th 2025
On the occasion of the International Day of Light on May 16, 2025, Berlin – based artist Franz John will illuminate a message on the façade of the Astronomy Center in Rijeka – a message that simultaneously marks an end and a beginning. Along the narrow struts of the building’s curved glass façade, light strips shine at the spacing of glass panel, forming – when read from left to right – the ASCII code for “00000100.” Blue light strips represent the zeros, and a red strip represents the one. According to international character code conventions, “00000100” stands for “End of Transmission.”
From the east side, the Astronomy Center Rijeka fittingly resembles a UFO – an aesthetically pleasing one to the human eye. By sending this message into the sky at such a cosmically resonant location, Franz John references the many attempts humanity has made to send messages into outer space, in hopes that one day an alien life form might receive and – hopefully – understand them. One example is the famous Arecibo message, which was sent in 1974 in binary code via radio waves to a star system 25,000 light-years from Earth.
Every message carries within itself the challenge of being bound to conventions that determine from where and where to within the framework of time and space it wishes to be read. A field of study that deals with this challenge is called xenolinguistics – the science of linguistic communication with extraterrestrials. This field aims to make such conventions as simple as possible and to accompany them with intuitively understandable signals, even for life forms with completely different bodies and interstellar experiences. Franz John employs a xenolinguistic invention called Solresol – a simple syllabic language used in the accompanying sound sequence to control the play of light and shadow across the light strips.
Text: Thomas Goldstrasz