《他頻誌》

Philosopher Thomas Nagel once posed the question, “What is it like to be a bat?”, highlighting that perception is never neutral. Every living being exists within a world shaped by its own sensory apparatus, and no single perspective can claim greater proximity to “reality”. Biologist Jakob von Uexküll described this as Umwelt — the unique phenomenal world constituted through the perceptual capacities of each organism. These worlds exist in parallel, each internally coherent in its own way. Bees perceive ultraviolet patterns invisible to the human eye; ants construct collective chemical languages through pheromones; weakly electric fish detect subtle fluctuations in electric fields underwater; and mantis shrimp possess sixteen types of colour receptors, far exceeding human visual perception. Each species senses, responds to, and understands the shared world through its own distinct mode of being.

The Other Frequency Journal takes these ideas as its point of departure. Presented in the form of hand-drawn manuscripts, the work consists of a series of speculative design sketches for imagined interspecies communication devices. Each drawing functions simultaneously as a structural diagram, operational proposal, and research note. These devices are ultimately impossible to realise, yet through their speculative construction they expose the narrowness and contingency of the perceptual frameworks humans habitually rely upon. Rather than seeking definitive answers, the work uses acts of imagining and designing as a means of opening new perspectives on encounters with other species. In seriously attempting to imagine how one might communicate with a fish, a bee, or a snake, the work suggests a possible starting point for reconsidering how coexistence between humans and other forms of life might be understood.