And they said you'd never learn anything from television. In the movie Contact, a team of radio astronomers intercept an early bounce-back TV signal that's encoded with instructions to build a massive machine. Sony Pictures Imageworks was charged with creating an alien language to bring those plans to life.
After studying logic, symbology, and ancient alphabets, graphic artist George Suhayda, senior art director Marty Kline, and company contrived a complex 3-D writing system. The surface-deep language begins with a million-plus pages of symbols, which must be stacked spatially to be read. When the dots align correctly, the interstellar message is revealed.
This article originally appeared in the August issue of Wired magazine.
