Katherine Pieniazek

Let’s rewind to February 2023.

For a brief, delicious moment, many of us (no judgment) were half-seriously entertaining the possibility of extraterrestrial first contact, the moment beings from a farflung civilization would finally land on Terran soil and extend a three-fingered hand in formal galactic welcome.

Call it what it was — a goddamn wild time.

Over the course of one surreal week, four unidentified objects were shot down over North America. South Carolina. Alaska. Yukon. Lake Huron. One of them was a confirmed balloon (presumably sent by someone who owns a spreadsheet in Beijing), but the others? Less clear.

At one point, a Pentagon official told reporters they weren’t “ruling out extraterrestrials.” Which is usually the part of the movie where someone gets abducted mid-sentence.

Civilian pilots reported shimmering metallic shapes and interference with their instruments. NORAD quietly admitted it had recalibrated its radar to pick up slower, smaller objects. It worked a little too well — suddenly there were “a lot” of blips. The official explanation? "Likely benign." Maybe weather stuff. Or hobbyist things. Probably not aliens. Don’t worry about it.

And just like that, the story vanished.

No wreckage photos

No further statements.

The media cycle moved on.

But for one fleeting moment, everyone — government agencies, pilots, Reddit, your cousin who listens to Joe Rogan — was weirdly aligned in the same question:

“Wait… was that it? Was that the intro?”

At the time I had two immediate thoughts:

- We’re still here. If they wanted to take over, we’d be a fine nanobot-infused paste by now.

- Cha-ching. This could be a fantastic business opportunity.

Which led me to the real question: If an advanced alien civilization showed up — what could we possibly offer them?

Cameras See in Narrow Spectrums. Mantis Shrimp Do Not.

Let’s talk about vision. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Because what we think we’re capturing with cameras — we’re not. Not even close.

The best digital cameras today, even top-tier professional models, use sensors designed to mimic the way humans perceive color through three channels: red, green, and blue. This is called the RGB color model. Your camera's sensor splits incoming light into these three bands, and the processor combines them to create the image you see on the screen.

But here’s the kicker: the human eye doesn’t just see RGB. We have three types of cone cells in our retinas that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light — roughly corresponding to red, green, and blue — but each cone is more nuanced than any camera sensor can replicate. Our brains combine signals from these cones to produce the full color experience, including the subtle gradations between shades and brightness levels.

Some humans — the lucky tetrachromats among us — even have a fourth cone. They walk through the world bathed in colors most of us will never even know we’re missing. And some animals, like the mantis shrimp, are casually rocking up to 16 different types of photoreceptors including UV, visible and polarised light—a whole spectrum beyond human sight, shades we don’t even have names for..

By comparison, your $6,000 camera? It sees about half of what you see.

The Adobe RGB color space covers ~50% of the visible spectrum. Your average screen (sRGB) handles even less — maybe 35%.

That’s not representation. That’s a rough draft.

Here’s what that means if you’re an artist: you can pour your soul into a canvas, layer pigment like a sorcerer, chase light across the spectrum — and still, the moment you try to photograph it? Flat. Muted. Wrong. No calibration trick, no color profile, no filter will ever truly resurrect what pigment does in real life.

Ask me how I know.

I’ve spent full afternoons photographing my paintings. Adjusting white balance, contrast, exposure. Tuning, tweaking, despairing. And still, the result is a ghost. A flattened echo. A facsimile of intention.

Analog art is messy. It shimmers. It absorbs and refracts. It lives in the in-between places — where light hits texture, where color bleeds into color. Digital tech isn’t failing because it’s sloppy. It’s failing because it’s literal. It doesn’t see. Not like we do. Not like the mantis shrimp does.

And maybe that’s the point.

Not everything real can be digitized.

Not everything beautiful can be bottled.

AI Doesn’t Know What a Sunset Feels Like

Here’s the million-dollar truth: AI can imitate a scene, but it doesn’t experience it.

It can churn out endless variations, from hyper-realistic landscapes to surreal dreamscapes. But here’s the catch: AI doesn’t experience a sunset. It doesn’t feel the slow fade of light as it warms your skin. It doesn’t sense the quiet hum of mosquitoes buzzing nearby or the slight stickiness of a lukewarm beer sweating in your hand.

It can mimic the look of a moment, but it can’t inhabit it.

- You can sample the color — not the context.

- You can upscale the image — not the intimacy.You can replicate the form — rarely the feeling.

And yes, it sounds romantic to say that. But the romance matters.

Even Bears — yes, actual bears — have been observed watching sunsets.

Not for food. Not for shelter. Not for utility.

Just... watching.

They sit. They look. They stay.

There’s no survival logic to it. No evolutionary edge.

Only the quiet suggestion that maybe the experience of beauty predates us. Maybe it’s not a human invention. Maybe it’s simply what happens when consciousness meets the world and, for a brief moment, pauses to register that it’s breathtaking.

No post-processing. No aesthetic filter. No caption needed.

That’s the part we still haven’t cracked. Because art isn’t just representation — it’s recognition. Of something in us that pauses, looks, and thinks, “Yes. That.”

AI can calculate gradients, but it can’t fake the pulse behind the paint. Analog art breathes with us. It carries presence.

First Contact and the Art Exchange

Jumping back to 2023, I found myself looking up the sky thinking: what could an advanced alien civilization possibly want from us that we could realistically give them?

What, exactly, do we send back?

What represents us?

Food, though no doubt exotic to them would be too risky.

The interstellar equivalent of biosecurity would be extreme. Even Australia fumigates every suitcase — now scale that up to an alien civilisation with no immunity to our microbes and no tolerance for the biological unknown.

Minerals? Unlikely.

Earth’s global powers struggle to agree on trade routes here on the ground, let alone space exports. The politics would be a nightmare.

But culture? Now that’s something.

Not because it's useful, but precisely because it's not. Because it signals something deeper than survival — it signals intention, identity, abstraction. It signals that we not only live, but reflect on what that living means.

That’s why it’s not inconceivable that the first real exchange between us and an alien civilisation might not be a treaty or a technology trade — but an art swap.

And not because they need our art.

But because they’re testing for something far more subtle:

- Can we encode meaning in pattern?

- Can we tolerate ambiguity?

- Can we respond with metaphor, not malfunction?

In short: can we demonstrate consciousness?

Because art, at its core, is a kind of proof-of-consciousness. It’s a signal, like a lighthouse in the void. It says, Someone is home. Not just simulating intelligence, but inhabiting it. 

Experiencing contradiction. Seeking resonance.

And if that’s true — if culture becomes the currency of contact — then we may need to rethink what qualifies as our most valuable export.

Forget the glossy conceptual installations critiquing capitalism or avant-garde digital glitches. They’d want something primal, anthropological, something that says:

“This is who we are. This is what we eat. This is where we live.”

That’s why cave paintings still mesmerize us today, they’re humanity’s original postcards across time.

They’d want:

- A still life of fruit on a wooden table

- A charcoal drawing of hands shelling peas

- A mural painted by children on a school wall

Artifacts of attention. Records of intention.

And here’s the cosmic punchline:

We are still the newcomers, fresh on the scene, barely a few centuries out of the industrial age, blinking into radio. Which means Earth art, paradoxically, might be on trend. The latest thing. A novelty. The galactic equivalent of discovering the Rococo, Punk, or Surrealism, just as it’s breaking.

Our creative output wouldn’t just be symbolic — it would be cool. A whole species going through its adolescence in public, experimenting with form, meaning, irony. 

Human-made art is the ultimate rare asset class. Look at the skyrocketing value of collectibles—from Japanese hinoki buckets sold for obscene sums to Pokémon cards that trade hands for six figures. Craftsmanship and human stories are currency.

Think of Earth’s cultural exports as the next Labubus: raw, chaotic, highly collectible.

First contact might not be about us joining a federation.

It might be about our first gallery showing.

Analog Art as Humanity's Receipt

It’s our proof of personhood. Each stroke a signature of sentience.

One of the stranger things about this era is that we’re producing more images than ever — and yet fewer and fewer of them can be traced to a human hand.

AI-generated visuals flood our feeds: stunning, surreal, often indistinguishable from the real thing. But there’s a catch. They don’t carry intent. They don’t carry origin. They don’t carry authorship.

They don’t prove we were here.

At best, they suggest someone had electricity and an internet connection. But they’re not evidence of experience. Not in the way a child’s drawing is. Or a cave painting. Or a shaky oil sketch done on a Tuesday in a fit of heartbreak.

Analog art is messy, personal, unscalable — and that’s exactly the point.

It's our receipt.

The thing you wave at the universe and say: Look. This was made by hand. This was felt by someone.

In a world filling fast with synthetic everything, maybe that’s how we’ll signal we were ever real.

Bring It Home: The Romance of the Handmade

Frame it with tenderness. The analog isn’t just a medium — it’s a language of affection.

When we draw, carve, stitch, or paint, we’re doing more than making something beautiful. We’re embedding time, choice, and care into matter. We’re translating feeling into form. And that may be the closest thing we have to a universal dialect, one that transcends species, planets, even dimensions.

A handmade object says:

I was here. I cared enough to shape this with my own hands. I left a mark not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

That’s not just communication. That’s communion.

And if anyone’s out there — watching our scrambled broadcasts and ancient reality TV reruns — maybe this is the one message that gets through.

The one that says we're not just intelligent.

We're not that different.