EOT : END OF TRANSMISSION

Astronomy Center Rijeka, Croatia
Light installation for the UNESCO International Day of Light

May 16th – May 18th 2025


videoclip (7min)

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


Curator: Ingeborg Fülepp. In collaboration with the Uni­versi­ty of Rijeka – Center for the Pro­mo­tion and Popu­lar­iza­tion of Science (Socri.Uniri.hr), Astronomical Society Rijeka.