Fig. 1: The Great Silence (10:13), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.




        The Fermi paradox is this: our inability to find conclusive evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life despite how vast and old the universe is. This is the conflictual and controversial premise of an artwork called The Great Silence, which is another name for the Fermi paradox. It is a video work (17min.) by the artist duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, a renowned science fiction writer. The video features a story written by Chiang, told from the point of view of a species of parrots that live in Puerto Rico, more specifically in Arecibo, at the foot of the observatory that owned the world’s largest radiotelescope until 2020. The fictional narrative is the final message from the parrots of the Rio Abajo to humanity, which seems too focused on finding extra-terrestrial intelligent life to listen to the species surrounding it on earth. The video alternates between images of the parrot species and its habitat, footage of the observatory and the telescope in motion, and live graphs of unknown origin. The audio consists only of intervals of the electronic humming and rhythmics of the different parts of the radiotelescope, and the parrots communicating among themselves. In this work, critical theory, science fact and fiction intertwine to bring our attention not to how the world around us looks but how it sounds. The Anthropocentric gaze, the human-centered lens with which we see the world, has been extensively researched by writers such as Derrida, Anna Tsing or Donna Haraway, in response to older texts on the problematics of looking at animals.

This work proposes a different theoretical and poetic approach to re-considering our place in the universe. Like in works of science fiction, The Great Silence borrows the perspective outside of the present human one to act as a mirror for our species’ behavior. This essay will use cross-textual analysis, using John Berger’s writing as a departure point, and visual analysis to explore the convergence of science fact and speculative fiction in The Great Silence and what it tells us of the state, and the future, of human to non-human contact.


In his essay “John Berger’s Why Look at Animals”, Jonathan Burt revisits the famous text on the relationship between humans and animals under capitalism. Burt argues that Berger’s title, the question of “why”, is immediately made irrelevant by Berger’s own arguments on the alienation of humans from animals and the nature of our modern capitalist times. Berger’s text divides the history of human-animal relations in a time before capitalism and a time after the “rupture” brought about by capitalism and modern society. He argues that humans have, pre-rupture, always had a relationship with animals, all species included, in which humans both could appreciate and hunt, objectify essentially, animals. Burt lays down numerous issues with this conception of human and non-human relations, one of which concerns language. Burt argues that the “look” that Berger writes about is “modelled on an idea of linguistic exchange.” In other words, Berger confounds the human gaze, our one-directional and linear way of looking at, with the dialogue between human and animal. In this way, he presupposes and reinforces the spiecist idea that humans are linguistic beings and animals are not. This confusion leaves no possibilities for other species to “look” back at us, engage with us. Berger’s entire essay is uni-directional and does not seek, either, to encourage conversation or any kind of communication with other species that is not rooted in this separation based on language. The Great Silence explores sound and language as a defiance of speciesism and its definition of intelligence that excludes non-human species altogether. The opening subtitles of the work read as follows:


The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. // But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?


Chiang cleverly displaces the field of debate from the act of looking to the act of listening. The juxtaposition of first person writing and the question of communication directly addressed to the viewer immediately focuses the discourse on why there hasn’t been more extensive experiments of interspecies contact. The story goes on to string the film together with the scientific and symbolic importance of sound for both humans and parrots.

It first emphasizes the human longing for a connection with “intelligent” life, the longing for a sonorous sign of extra-terrestrial life. The term intelligent used here refers to certain cognitive abilities, coincidentally observed in humans, specifically the use of language as means for communication. In terms of scientific fact, The Great Silence points to studies on the cognitive abilities of parrots by Irene Pepperberg - a groundbreaking experiment with a Grey Parrot named Alex proving that birds of his species were not only capable of repeating words, but that they could understand the concepts attached to them and evoke them intentionally. By bringing the importance of this study to public attention, this work attempts to re-imagine our gaze, and our definition of intelligence: if parrots have the cognitive capabilities to mimic and grasp our communication system, why are we looking for other life forms, the existence of which we are not even sure of, to realize this yearning for connection? The conclusion to draw from this is that “intelligent” does not only mean “with whom i can potentially communicate.” To go back to Berger’s differentiation of humans and animals, he writes that no animal can “confirm man” because the animal lacks common language, is silent. The latter affirmation, that the animal is silent is, as demonstrated above, and with the advent of new technology and studies, decidedly not true. The first affirmation, however, illuminates the definition of “intelligent” that we are looking for. Communication, according to Berger, is an exchange of “confirmation” of one being by another. Thus, even if non-human species possess linguistic capacities, possibly untapped by humans, they are still not in the position, in Berger’s reasoning, to return the confirmation of “man.” Intelligent life, hence, is decidedly life that resembles the human in other ways than linguistic capabilities. The Great Silence, essentially argues that humans are in fact looking for mirrors of themselves.


This point is emphasized later in the video:


But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will ever be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light-years away?


Here the artists are bringing to light another facet of the Anthropocene. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing tackles the ways in which capitalism prevents us, not from an inherent connection with other species, as Berger suggests, but from exploring possible routes to this connection. Tsing argues that capitalism, in creating the foundations of Anthropocentric societies, has convinced itself that progress is a quality that is inextricably linked with humanity and that it distinctly separates us from other species. This had several repercussions.

It has helped to reinforce the inherent cognitive hierarchy between human and non human-species, and has allowed the over-exploitation of the planet to continue unperturbed for as long as it has. It has also established that whatever phenomena exist outside of a linear and forward time-movement, the one dictated by production and consumption cycles, is not relevant to humanity. This argument falls in line with the sentence above. Humans may in fact not be looking for kin either. Humanity’s obsession with the search for intelligent extra-terrestrial life is perhaps fueled by its alignment with our current ideas of progress. Perhaps it is less because we are genuinely interested in the possibility of interaction with an “ultimate other” that can share our cognitive landscape and with which we can sensically dialogue, that we have “built an ear that can listen across the universe” . Perhaps it is more because we see space as the next entity to conquer. The entertwining history of capitalism and colonialism would tend to support this idea.


The mise-en-scène of the short film presses on the matter of potential colonial motivations further. The opening frame is a still shot of an unidentified part of Arecibo, the radiotelescope. We hear only a white noise, a kind of humming. This is followed by a shot of the puerto rican rainforest where Arecibo is located and in which reside the parrots (Fig. 2). The audio is a recording of the parrots’ calls. The film alternates between footage of Arecibo and footage of the parrots. Gradually, as we start to get a more intricate and overall visual understanding of Arecibo, the parrots’ natural habitat is replaced by cages in the rainforest, where the birds are held captive (Fig. 3 & 4). The way either element is shot accentuates the connotations the viewer may already associate to the parrot and the telescope. The parrot, filmed up close, its natural element almost invaded by the camera, mirrors our “proximity” to this species. It reflects the way we think we have already conquered all that we have to know about them, that we have already tamed them. The sound of parrots chirping is familiar to us, it can even be soothing; the sounds of the rainforest are commonly used in ambiance sound machines namely. But the radio-telescope, to the common viewer, is something completely extra (out of the) ordinary. We do not understand the graphs presented to us (Fig.5), nor do we know anything about the mechanisms presented in the footage. We are in awe of what we do not know. This is perhaps inherently human. But the assumption that the common viewer may have, that they have a sufficient grasp on the parrot, what it is, what it can and cannot do, is arguably the residual thought of arguments like Berger’s.  Derrida made this evident in The Animal That Therefore I Am: the most harmful presumption, that has permeated reflections on the relations between humans and non-humans is the word “animal.” It has, Derrida argues, effaced all distinction between different species, between different beings of the same species, and has created the collective (predominantly western) illusion that we have a grasp on “what they call animal,” which has in turn allowed us to erect ourselves as cognitive superiors. This is why we are more interested in the grandness and anonymity of the telescope.  Under capitalism, “animals” no longer have a place on Noah’s arc: they do not follow the forward march of production and consumption cycles, and we believe that they cannot tell us anything about the universe that we do not already know.

The before-last shot shows us a single empty cage (Fig.6). The sounds of birds calling still echo in the frame but the parrots are no longer visible. The last shot finally presents the radio-telescope in its entirety, slowly pivoting as it transmits and receives simultaneously      (Fig. 7). It is in these last few minutes that the narrator reveals that this is the parrots’ last message to humanity as they prepare for their extinction. Echoing the last words of Alex the Grey parrot to his owner, “the message is this: You be good. I love you.” Symbolically, the film follows the forward march mentioned by Tsing: the parrots surrender to the machines that humanity’s disinterest for its own place in the earth’s ecosystem has created. The parrots are slowly crushed under the turning gears of Arecibo. The last message, full of understanding, care and resignation for humankind, makes the irony of our cultural endeavors even more seering. Not only has humanity’s western-dominated capitalist record been one of destruction of species that it encounters, but humans, too are on the verge of extinction.

At the beginning of the film, the viewer can read this:


Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.


These two sentences are a warning.


By choosing to end on a note of moral high ground from the parrots (“Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. They just weren’t paying attention.”), the artists also inverse the power dynamics of “intelligence.” The parrots are not imploring humanity to stop the forward march. In a way, like Berger, the narrator has resigned in the face of human alienation from its vital surroundings. However, unlike Berger, the film installation provides a tool to re-examine human conceptions of intelligence, communication and language. That tool is science fiction.


Donna Haraway in Staying With the Trouble, introduces the possibilities for re-invention of our socio-cultural environments through the combination of science fact and speculative fabulation. Haraway invents the Chtulucene, a new paradigm of habitation of the earth; in Kainos, the now and the new, and with Chtonic beings, the ancient and the just-born, “critters” that have “no truck with the sky-gazing Homo.” Haraway goes on to argue that both science fact and speculative fabulation are necessary for the invention of this new mode of interconnected living. Towards the second half of the film, the story makes a tangent on the symbolic importance of sound in human cultures, and speculates on its importance for parrots, based on the fact that both species are “vocal learners.”

Indeed, both humans and parrots have the ability to reproduce sounds they hear, contrary for example to the dog, who can identify a sound, its meaning even, but cannot reproduce or re-transmit it. Chiang writes:


It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. / The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak, therefore I am. / Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.


These sentences appear as subtitles over footage of a parrot looking straight into the camera, right at the viewer. By imagining how parrots relate to language and the act of speaking based on what we know of their abilities to communicate together (through contact calls), and to assimilate some of our communication codes (understanding that the sounds we make are attached to concepts), Chiang and Allora & Calzadilla propose a new bridge across the cognitive waters supposedly dividing us and other species. The element of speculation is predominant here, which makes these claims at this moment in time, impossible to verify. However, their potential goes beyond probability or plausability. Similarly to Haraway’s reasoning, science fact and speculative fabulation, here, reveal themselves in their potential to explore new ways for humans to relate to their vital surroundings. If we are to find a way to a more primary (as in without mediation), way of inhabiting the earth, we must invent ways to understand our surroundings differently. Why, as the film suggests, have humans only recently considered the possibility that other species might be “intelligent”? - “Humans like to think they are unique.” The film suggests that we have almost always imposed our own terms, our own definitions of intelligence, language and communication on other species. Speculation and fiction could help us escape the anthropocentric gaze and find ways to practice listening, an act of being attentive, of giving attention, rather than looking, an act of demanding. In other words, we must find intra-terrestrial empathy. In Donna Haraway’s terms we must find and create kin among a new order, one in which we allow other species and their languages to teach us about the universe.



The Great Silence is another way of referring to the Fermi paradox: the fact that we have not yet been able to identify any form of life on other planets when the universe is as old and vast as it is. Arecibo, and humankind, await the sign of extra-terrestrial life in order to declare that humans are not the only “intelligent” life-form in the universe, that the universe is not “silent”. What The Great Silence argues is that we have in fact failed to take seriously any extra-human forms of intelligence on our own planet, that we have convinced ourselves that the Earth and its non-human inhabitants is silent.

This work not only provides scientific evidence that the world around humans is decidedly cacophonous, it also proposes ways for us to once again tune into the frequencies of the world around us through speculative narrative. Here the question is not “why?”, it is “how?”. In The Great Silence, interspecies communication can begin at the interstice between science and fiction.












Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014). pp 243-260.


Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). pp. 1-8 & 99-103.


Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). pp. 13-26.


Burt, Jonathan. “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading.” Worldviews, 9,2 (2005) pp. 203-2018.


Moser, Keith. Contemporary French Environmental Thought in the Post-COVID-19 Era. (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). pp. 103-144.


Smith, Julie A, and Robert W Mitchell. Experiencing Animal Minds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). pp. 201-216. https://doi.org/10.7312/smit16150.


Pepperberg, Irene M. The Alex Studies Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). pp. 321-328.


The Great Silence, 2014, Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang.



Fig. 2: The Great Silence (00:55), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.



Fig. 3: The Great Silence (08:09), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.



Fig. 4: The Great Silence (09:36), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.




Fig. 5: The Great Silence (04:26), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.



Fig. 6: The Great Silence (14:51), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.




Fig. 7: The Great Silence (15:43), © Allora & Calzadilla in collaboration with Ted Chiang, 2014.