Sentient Beings of Other Worlds

Catherine Aiello

Interview by L. Valena

First, tell me what you responded to.

It was basically a link to a supposed communication device with aliens. Or like you were transported to another world, either the desert world or the water world. There was a chat box that you could type in and then the other beings would respond. So that was sort of the experience that I responded to, which was not what I was expecting, I have to say! 

It’s the first thing that we’ve ever had like that. It was cool to send it to you and be like, “Here!” So what was your first reaction, what were you thinking about when you went through that experience?

It was interesting! I was willing to suspend my disbelief and be like, Okay, I’m going to another world. This is a thing I’m deciding to just embrace and go with it. I’ve been thinking lately about fantasy, as far as writing and movies and things like that. Sometimes I feel a little let down by fantasy. I want it to really create a new world and a new society and a new way of understanding life. Sometimes it just feels like our same shit projected onto aliens or other beings.

It’s interesting because it can be a commentary on our society, but I’m sometimes disappointed that it doesn’t let us go somewhere totally new and reimagine what’s possible in terms of other ways of being, other life forms, things like that. Anyway, I was thinking about that, and I appreciated how the writing described these beings in a physical way. Like the ones in the desert were described as sharing consciousness among multiple bodies, and the way that they moved. It was really interesting to me to think about what could be out there. And how might we interact with these other creatures if faced with them. 

What were your conversations like?

They were baffling, honestly! They didn’t seem to respond directly to anything that I said. I felt like, well, this is what it would really be like, honestly. We’re in such different worlds that you can’t even really have a real conversation without being able to know more about how the other is thinking. Or how they communicate. Even though it was translated; also it was an internet interface, it wasn’t an actual… [laughs] The suspension of disbelief broke down a little bit at some point. But it did make me think, maybe they just have a totally different way of understanding the world that is made apparent by how they talk.

I remember asking them very practical questions. Like: “Do you trip a lot over all of your feet?” Do you remember what you asked?

I went with very practical questions like, “What are you doing here?” and “What is your name?” It became apparent that the answers were not gonna be clear. They were like fragments of poetry or descriptions of things that I could figure out a way to interpret but were not directly connected to anything. 

What happened next? Where did you go from there?

I thought about it for a couple of days and made some notes about the things that came up for me, thinking about other worlds and the descriptions of traveling through a wormhole. I imagined the visual, sensory experience of traveling through time and space like that. And I thought about the inherent frustration of communication. That came up as a theme for me. So I just thought through some of the themes before I even tried to do anything artistic with it. Then I just started sketching these little creatures and seeing what came and let them emerge as these different ways of being. They were both intuitive and caused me to push myself a little bit. “Okay, but I don’t have to give it legs and I don’t have to give it a head.” You know? How else could a being be encapsulated in a form? It became really fun to see, once I drew a line, what could be added to it? What could come to make it possible that this could hold life in some way?

Are animals a big deal for you? That’s not quite the right question, but I think you know what I’m trying to say!

Yeah, I get it! They’re not necessarily something that has appeared in my art very often. That’s not usually where I go but I do think about animals a lot. I have a cat and I spend a lot of time watching her. I feel baffled sometimes by what she wants or is doing, even though I spend so much time with her. I’ve also been fascinated lately by watching squirrels and chipmunks. They seem to be in a state of panic right now. Anytime you see one, they’re just trying to find the biggest nut, or taking a bite out of a nut and then they drop it and run away. Or then they run up a tree and they look like they’re willing to throw themselves under the wheel of your car for seemingly no reason. I don’t know, they’re just very manic right now and it’s interesting to watch what’s going on with them.

What do you think about communication with animals or sentient beings? What does a sentient being mean to you?

Like I said, I have a hard time communicating with my cat, so I can’t say I’m an expert on this. But I know people who really do take that seriously and have experience with that. My sister works with horses and she knows people who seem to be able to communicate with them in a physical, telepathic way. It’s just baffling to me but she’s like, I’ve seen it! It works! I do believe that that’s possible. I don’t know how but I’m hopeful.

This isn’t about an animal, but I’ve been reading the books Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Both of them talk about plants, trees, and other life forms as being sort of sentient beings. We don’t communicate with them in a human way necessarily, but they do communicate with each other and with the other species around them. I think that’s really interesting and not something that I’d thought about as explicitly before. It’s influencing the way that I’m thinking about the world right now.

Me too! Last summer, I went to the Oxford Food Symposium, and Harold McGee gave the keynote. He was talking about how plants communicate with each other through smell. Like the smell of freshly mowed grass: that’s the grass telling the root system, “Rein it in guys! There’s something eating us up here!” Fascinating, you know?

Oh yes, while l was doing this drawing, that was influencing it, too. There’s so much possibility that is very hard for our human minds to wrap around. There are so many ways of being, and being in relation to other things. 

Do you have any advice for someone else approaching this project for the first time? 

No. You set it up in a way, at least for me, that I was able to approach it like, this doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, this doesn’t have to be “the right answer”. It’s just what happens. And that’s something that I’m trying to embrace right now in my own creative practice, just following impulses and seeing what happens. That in itself can be valuable, rather than thinking it has to have this thing that leads to something else because that’s just not the purpose right now. So I guess, just really take in the advice that’s laid out and just go with it. 

Call Number: Y38NA | Y40VA.aieSe

Catherine Aiello is an artist working in printmaking, textiles and drawing. She's interested in using making as a way to connect with others and document the world around her, including social and interpersonal phenomena, in non traditional ways. She lives and works in Western Massachusetts. http://www.catherineaiello.com