September 28, 2012
Will This Cat Piano Make the Aliens Want to Kill Us? A Cat Piano designed by 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher works by jabbing each kitty’s tail to produce a particular mew. The sadistic (but apparently never built) invention is part of The Last Pictures, the collection of 100 images Trevor Paglen will send into orbit on a EchoStar satellite this fall. Carl Sagan’s cheerful we-are-the-world optimism is absent from Paglen’s missive to unknown life forms. The presumptive great achievements of human civilization-–space travel, modern art–-come off as quaint and obsolete. Images stand in for global warming, industrial pollution, and man’s inhumanity to man, expressed in deviously cheerful images of prisoners of war and Agent-Orange deformed children. Even cats are pressed into service as a piano. If Earth hasn’t been destroyed by the time aliens find this, it could make them want to finish the job. Read more.

Will This Cat Piano Make the Aliens Want to Kill Us?

A Cat Piano designed by 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher works by jabbing each kitty’s tail to produce a particular mew. The sadistic (but apparently never built) invention is part of The Last Pictures, the collection of 100 images Trevor Paglen will send into orbit on a EchoStar satellite this fall. Carl Sagan’s cheerful we-are-the-world optimism is absent from Paglen’s missive to unknown life forms. The presumptive great achievements of human civilization-–space travel, modern art–-come off as quaint and obsolete. Images stand in for global warming, industrial pollution, and man’s inhumanity to man, expressed in deviously cheerful images of prisoners of war and Agent-Orange deformed children. Even cats are pressed into service as a piano.

If Earth hasn’t been destroyed by the time aliens find this, it could make them want to finish the job. Read more.

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2:23pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZycdexUFAVFT
(Notes: 72)
  
Filed under: Cats Creative Time Trevor Paglen piano space Carl Sagan 
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    Well I guess if someone hates cats… Imagine dogs playing the shit out of it, going all Tori Amos on their… Tails…
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