Yvette Granata
University of Michigan
Yvette Granata is a media artist and media scholar. She works across multiple media and creates immersive installations, interactive environments, video art, VR films, and hypothetical technological systems. She writes about media theory, philosophy, and digital media culture. She is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Michigan in the Department of Film, Television, and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. Her work has been exhibited at the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, The Kunsthalle of Media and Light Art in Detroit, Papy Gyro Nights in Norway and Hong Kong, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center in Buffalo, among others. She has published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. She holds a Phd from SUNY Buffalo’s Media Arts Program, a research masters from the University of Amsterdam, and a BA from University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Twelve Year Hello
Twelve Year Hello is an interactive digital installation that plays with the concept of human and alien perceptual thresholds of sound across time. In 1950, mathematician Enrico Fermi noted that, statistically, the universe should be teeming with life and posed the question “But where is everybody?” The universe is old and our solar system is not the oldest, thus advanced alien life must exist. So why do we not see any evidence of them? Known as the Fermi Paradox, many have since tried to answer this question. The Twelve Year Hello is my proposal for one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. What if it takes aliens twelve years to say hello? What if we simply cannot find evidence or signals of their existence because we live in very different perceptual thresholds based on different timeframes? Human perceptual thresholds are time-bound to the norms of our local solar system and local environment. We would not be able to identify someone saying “hello” stretched over multiple years. In Twelve Year Hello, I explore this by slowing down a recording of myself saying “hello” at different speeds, played on top of a ‘hello’ stretched out for 12 years. This work is one part of an ongoing series in which I explore various speculative solutions to the Fermi Paradox in which I explore the breakdown of perceptual systems, technological systems, and ultimately the breakdown of numerical systems and mathematics itself.