Concrete Playground

We have friends with amusing names like Yellow Giant, Supernova, Brown Dwarf and Stella Black Hole. They problem is they don’t know we exist. So we must yell until they hear us. Six thousand fixed luminous points in the night sky are visible to the naked eye, but there are more than a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is of course but one of billions of known galaxies. So we must yell kinda loud.

We’ve been trying since the 1970s. Emblems of our existence like I Love Lucy episodes, greetings in ancient Sumerian and whale, complex mathematical equations and soft porn (apparently) have been sent deep into space, but we’re still waiting to hear back. Australia’s first interstellar message offered to the stars was a funny, sad and intimate monologue that was filmed at Next Wave in Melbourne in 2008, sent to the Deep Space Communications Network in Florida, USA, converted into radio waves and transmitted light-years away. But, we’re still waiting to hear back.

This month Performance Space and Ampersand Magazine are launching the Yelling At Stars DVD with the writer, director and performer Willoh S. Weiland discussing the project then and now, so that maybe together we can figure out what is taking our friends so damn long.

Image: glowing hydrogen gas with small amounts of other elements like oxygen and sulfur, taken by NASA's Hubble in M17, a hotbed of star formation.