Ted Chiang

A look at the source story, core human themes, the challenges and process of bringing the story to the screen, casting, creating realistic characters within their fields of expertise, alien ship and being design, costumes, alien language construction, and Denis Villeneuve's work.

A journey through the evolution of time travel; from it origins, it's evolution and influence in science fiction, to the exciting possibilities in the future.

The Great Silence focuses on the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe. This site is also home to the last remaining wild population of endangered Puerto Rican parrots, Amazona vittata, who make their habitat in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest. Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script that explores translation as a device to trace and ponder the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors. In the spirit of a fable, the subtitled story presents the bird’s observations on humans’ search for life outside this planet, while using the concept of vocal learning—something that both parrots and humans have in common—as a source of reflection upon acousmatic voices, ventriloquisms, and the vibrations that form the basis of speech and the universe itself.