Paulina Tarara

This research, developed during an artistic residency as part of a PhD project, is a multimodal art-and-science inquiry into the interspecies structure and evolution of language within the context of digital communication. It explores how language might evolve in the near future under the influence of technology, data science, and visual-symbolic systems, considering the potential emergence of a unified communicative standard that integrates visual symbols, mathematical structures, neural signals, and data-driven patterns. The project is also informed by Argentina’s strong culture of sky observation, understood both as a scientific practice and as a cultural attitude of attentiveness toward the unknown.

By examining communication across multiple scales—from cellular information exchange and biological signaling to plant and animal communication, as well as human, artificial, and programming languages—the research seeks to identify shared patterns and structural principles. These could form the basis of a communicative framework capable of transcending species, cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries. In dialogue with posthumanist thought, the project shifts the focus away from exclusively human language toward a broader field of entities and systems that generate and exchange information and meaning.

At its core, the research understands communication as both a carrier of information and a generator of meaning. Drawing on Shannon’s information theory and semiotics, it investigates where signal and meaning converge and diverge across different systems, proposing a model to classify language structures according to whether they function as rule-based systems, symbolic sets, or information networks. From this perspective, similarities between communicative systems may begin to outweigh their differences, pointing toward future standards shaped by data culture, technological mediation, and multimodal forms of expression, within a space where scientific knowledge and artistic exploration mutually inform one another.