On Carl Sagans 80th birthday, let us pause to consider how patriarchy has influenced our search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. The golden plaque mounted on the Pioneer spacecraft depicts a human male (see testes and penis) and a woman (who lacks a vagina). Some efforts were made to remedy this--to wit: Poetica Vaginal In 1986, I organized an artistic project to transmit vaginal contractions into space to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. The project, called Poetica Vaginal, involved artists, mechanical and electrical engineers, biologists, astronomers, professional dancers, architects, linguists and philosophers. A vaginal detector was built in a laboratory of mechanical engineering and consisted of a water-filled polyallomer centrifuge tube mounted on a hard nylon base that contained a very sensitive pressure transducer. Dancers and other female volunteers (unsolicited) hygienically invaginated the detector in order to characterize vaginal contractions (the fastest was clocked at 0.8 Hz). The embedded pressure transducer was sensitive enough to detect voice, heartbeat, and respiration as well as voluntary and involuntary vaginal contractions. Electronic music software was used to generate real time harmonics of vaginal contractions until that frequency matched one of the frequencies in the set of unique frequencies of English speech. A collaborating linguist bit-mapped those speech sounds (called, phonemes) so that they could be generated in real time corresponding to vaginal inputs. A digital map of the analog detector output was also made in real time. Thus, three forms of the message were simultaneously generated: 1) an analog signal directly generated by vaginal contractions; 2) a digital map of same and 3) voice (English phoenetic maps of vaginal contractions). Collaborating electrical engineers built gating circuits so that Poetica Vaginal signals could be transmitted from MITs million-watt Millstone Radar transmitter at Haystack Observatory in Groton/Westford, Massachusetts... Astronomers and astrophysicists collaborated in the selection of 4 nearby sunlike stars: Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and two unnamed sunlike (G-type) stars with RGO (Royal Greenwich Observatory) catalog numbers. These stars are from 10 to 40 light years distant. Their positions (right ascension and declination) were calculated so that radar signals could be targeted. The Vaginal Excursion Module was assembled at Haystack and preliminary test transmissions of vaginal signals were undertaken with sample vaginal signals recorded on audio tape. Then, on the eve before live broadcasts were to be made, the Millstone project Group Leader, a United States Air Force Colonel (Millstone Radar had been contracted tothe Air Force by MIT) terminated the project. Still, a few minutes of test transmissions were made to each of the four sunlike stars. -- Joe Davis
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 19:52:40 +0000
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