An Interview with Partly Cloudy
This project began as a creative writing piece off of a brief from the Grad Interactions Design course at Pratt in my final semester. Our task was to speculate the sensory experiences of extraterrestrial life in order to design a technology (fictional of course) that would allow us to communicate with them. As a precursor to the project, we would write a short fictional story, elaborating on the daily experiences, thoughts and feelings of our terrestrial life forms, shedding light on the physical barriers prohibiting humans to communicate with these beings.
The muse of my project was a world-renowned artist, partly cloudy. Half-human and half-cloud, partly’s niche was that she had all the feelings and intellect of a human but she, like her fellow clouds, could only communicate through extra-sensory perception. In an effort to find out more about her mysterious art works, we developed a coil head piece that receives telekenetic signals from the sky and transmits them to the third eye allowing humans to detect her feelings into articulable words. In addition, these signals are translated visually as radiowaves. Users read the radiowaves similar to braille to aid the translation process. At this time, only psychic mediums, experienced quantum physicists and some children are able to decode the signals from the sky. However, with the success of 1.0, we are working on an upgrade that will allow for more accessibility.