Outcome
Making things
Painting the gashapon machine and test the webcam
Laser cut the box hidden Arduino and wires and engrave QR Code
Sketches and visual expression
WIP Exhibition:
Physical:
A gashapon machine and each gashapon have an instruction.
A provocative manifesto includes controversial but often-talked about topics on Weibo (Chinese Twitter). Printed it on a big paper and invite audiences to follow the instruction in the gashapon and do some lingual changes.
Digital:
A website that includes all manifesto and the audience can choose a sentence in it. The programme will automatically do the changes for you.
Some visual elements I produced that related to the self-censorship
- Eye of Providence without eyes
- A Winnie Pooh consists of emoji
- A mechanical eye created in p5js
- Handwriting pronoun
Narrative images
Each poster tells a story about self-censorship. Some might be related to this topic while others are abstract storytelling.
Cathedral of Socialism
包豪斯的悖论 社会主义与政治无关性
Multiple Virtual Identities
The world we live in
Distortion Field
Self-censorship / WIP
Self-censorship is the act of censoring or classifying one’s own discourse. This is done out of fear of, or deference to, the sensibilities or preferences (actual or perceived) of others and without overt pressure from any specific party or institution of authority.
how we give in step by step from 和谐社会 to 水产
“Rivercrabbing” in the second paragraph is a Euphemisms for Internet censorship in China. I am not surprised to see China here at all.
When I am doing this project, I am in the situation of self-censorship as well. If I have done it well, I dare not to post them online. If I have done it badly, I don’t need to post them online to make a fool of myself. The result is the same, this project is only suited for submitting as a school assignment.
For WIP
This is a project about online self-censorship. In this project, the audience can see the process that how self-censorship changes our talking behaviours on social media and how we give up expressing sharp points in exchange for undisturbed.
If you reply to any tweets with word that contains the surname of China’s president (Xi=习) in Weibo (Chinese Twitter), this reply will automatically disappear in the comment section. You are the only one can see it and you won’t know others will not see it. You can’t against this rule so you type in another language instead. And next time before you send a tweet, you realise this rule and you decide don’t take this risk. You gave up some of the rights that were originally yours, even its insignificant.
There’s another situation: you know that they will ban this specific word, so you choose to use emoji instead. But the algorithm banned this emoji as well. Then you think next time you’ll use slash or asterisk to cut off each character or write the word upside down, or use homophonic network language, still doesn’t work. After you try many different ways you finally safe, but your clear and strong opinion has already become a bunch of garbled, which only you can understand it. You didn’t give in to the censorship mechanism, you worked hard against self-censorship, but the result is still the same. Receiver still not found.
One thing we talked about in the class is the forbidden words would not take turns, only more and more. Things already passed but those words are kept in secret forever.
We all know self-censorship is related to politics a lot, but
sensitive word: 996 (It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week. A number of Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue the 996 working hour system is a flagrant violation of Chinese law.)
The content:
In the case of being forced to work 10 hours, 12 hours, or even 14 hours a day, in 1st May 1886, more than 200,000 workers in Chicago in the United States took to the streets to fight for an eight-hour work system. To commemorate the workers’ movement, in July 1889, the Second International announced that it would set the annual today as the common festival of the international proletariat, Labor Day.
The picture: parade
The pop-up: No view permission
Material Preparation
6 controversial but often-talked-about topics.
- feminism
- show business
- politics
- religion
- LGBT
- euthanasia/death penalty
(maybe more gashapons later)
The other side of the self-censorship, apart from the government, will have different communities (groups) depending on the events. Fans group, religious fanatics, homophobia, etc.
6 instructions on each paragraph.
(Guaranteed to understand as much as possible after abbreviations)
- delete all vowel characters
- replace as much as possible words into emoji👿
- use abbreviation on some word
- use placeholder between each word (@#$%^&*+)
- reverse a word
- use pronouns (You-Know-Who for Voldemort)
Feminism:
You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Show Business:
Wrecking Ball was provocative, had a huge impact on pop culture and broke the vevo record. Miley is white and pop. It wins video of the year. Anaconda was provocative, had a huge impact on pop culture and broke the vevo record. Nicki is black and rap. It doesn’t even get nominated.
Politics:
This Dog got it right at local Polling Station by having a SHIT this how we all in this country feel about politics in UK.
Chinese authorities are using a mobile app to carry out illegal mass surveillance & arbitrary detention of Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region. “monitoring every aspect of people’s lives”
LGBT:
‘Homosexuality is the correct sexual orientation’ is an objective fact. ‘Acknowledging homosexuality is the correct sexual orientation’ is a personal choice.
(I retweet and said: ‘Acknowledging homosexuality is the correct sexual orientation’ is a personal choice. Advocating and appealing on ‘homosexuality is the correct sexual orientation is a personal choice’ is the wrong behaviour. Acknowledging paedophilia is also a personal choice. Everything in the world is a personal choice. How can anyone force you to choose something you don’t like? It’s not Cultural Revolution. But your behaviour is not correct. It’s not normal. You can’t be proud of it.)
(And of course, I use abbreviation ‘lt’ and ‘wg’ to instead paedophilia and Cultural Revolution based on Chinese pronunciation.)
my strange addiction is the reason i believe in euthanasia.
(some perverts will ask what’s ur strange addiction/do you wanna play with me)
Those are six mean words. Some of them make sense and others are abreaction.
Reference:
Workshops
Creative Coding
Unity
WHY UNITY?
- physics engine
- rendering engine
- animation pipeline
- scripting in C#
- simple audio mixing
- built-in XR support
- lots of other plugins and assets you can add
assets-scenes-samplescene.unity
直接拖到unity窗口的assets里
play状态退出会reset参数
shortcut
edit-project settings-Axes
🉑️连Arduino的keyboard之类的 控制方向 hor/ver
Vector3.zero = Vector3 (0,0,0)
stage 1 let the capsule moves
stage 2 a very simple game and I type the wrong text
Competition Project
Brief:
https://opencall.sciencegallery.com/gender
Keywords:
Gender, Sex, Body, Environment
It seems like a part of human nature that naked bodies are thought to be strongly connected to porn. But sometimes, these feelings of erotics are influenced by various factors such as environment, forms or decorations. One of the most well-known examples is that famous artworks often includes naked female bodies, as they’re seen as arts in gallery environments.
Body
‘Erotic art is truly an image without context, a naked and pure image that transgresses the norm by making the private, the intimate and the sexual public, expressing the infinite power and beauty of the subconscious.’
From this, we can see that as long as the artist or an official institution claims that those pornographic visual materials are erotic art, or they are placed in solemn and grand occasions, such as museums, they are undoubtedly arts.
Environment
Nature and Consciousness
Experiments
Experiments 2
Shooting layout
Projected Objects
Feedback and refinement
Crit
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
—— Andy Warhol, 1968
Everyone wants 15 minutes to be fame every day.
——One participant of We Live in Public Project, 1999
At present, because there are so many channels by which an individual might attain fame, albeit not enduring fame, virtually anyone can become famous for a brief period of time.
In the future, everyone will be obscure for 15 minutes.
There are some visual demonstrations that expressing the relationship of coherent entangled information explosion.
凝缩和移置本质上是语言学现象，意义要么（以隐喻方式）被凝缩，要么（以换喻方式）被移置。
Steganography vs Signified | Machine vs Human
Messages can be understood by the machine not human.
Messages can be understood by human not machine.
Homonym and Acronym
He Xie, which is a homonym for harmony and a phrase that is used regularly by the government.
Improvement
Focusing on the topic that ‘how machine can change our behaviour’.
‘Receiver Not Found’ could have two interpretations. One is from the government which will let some ‘dangerous people’ disappear, the other is from the net friends who can’t know all your screen names and social media account, which means they can only know a part of you. When you discard this account, they will lose you forever.
Self-gaze, or self-censorship, shows the experience that people constantly reflect on their behaviour in daily online surfing. Not only is the subject of being monitored, but also as the subject of the speech and the individual being watched by others.
The purpose of the government is making us be conscious of self-censorship, online and offline.
Although being watched all the time, people still would like to post privacy online to get some attention back, and looking for friendship in cyberspace is a convenient way indeed.
How do people self-examine? How do people make friends online? How do people examine themselves and make friends at the same time?
Unfortunately, we cannot type words and images in one sentence and that’s the reason we need emoji. emoji is one of the most commonly used signified in network language. By transferring the mental concept into a visual element, the original meaning of the words will not be lost but can escape online surveillance at the same time.
Self-censorship
Homonym and Acronym are two ways when people post something online (for example, on social media) to express opinions or say some bad words but don’t want others to search because we don’t quite understand how the search engine works.
For example, if one wants to say something about the 主席 (chairman) on Weibo (Chinese twitter) but he afraid that others know. To be on the safe side, he would type this word as 主/席 or . So we can use emoji to instead word.
information hide in messy code
Text – Pronunciation translation
Hieroglyphic translation
Classic Chinese meaning translation
Meaning Extend translation
Mixed translation
Multiple virtual identities
Iteration and First Idea
Tutorial suggestions:
- The thing you see will change if the perspective changed.
- You have no idea if there’s anyone or anything behind the CCTV.
- Central-gazed from the government and distributed-gazed from other users about virtual identities.
- A machine can shoot from many angels which is more flexible.
- Human vs machine gaze, Visual gaze vs data gaze.
- Show a more specific preference about the question, the aspect of social contact or political
- network gazed and virtual identity
- more than being gazed by machine or human, but by ‘digital ghosts’
Iterating ideas:
Receiver Not Found
How the anonymity and pseudonymity of virtual identity help one escape double gaze from the government and other users?
He proved how in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire.
Everyone is being gazed from both sides online.
The government side is a bit like a Panopticon. You don’t know if you are being watched but you need to be careful and be responsible for your own words and deeds.
AND
Everything you post online will be seen and judged by your followers, even strangers. For this, you need a new screen name that no one knows you to say something that you actually want to say. This kind of gaze pressure.
BUT
Your followers and strangers may don’t know all your screen names but the government is monitoring you.
AND
In this case, you don’t know if you are monitoring by people or machines.
SO
How to find a balance in the central supervision of the government and the surrounding gaze from different netizens?
People are willing to pay privacy in exchange for the feeling of being connected with others. This feeling is so strong that we need to constantly confirm that we are being needed by our peers. People don’t mind being watched by others while they are watching others. But once it exceeds a certain degree, people are willing to cut everything off and start again. And it’s easy online because the internet is always pseudonymous.
It’s a confounding and eerie sensation to feel social while alone, thronged with invisible entities whose presence is felt yet who appear wholly absent. The entities are our 21st-century ghosts.
We call to one another in the darkness of the internet, reuniting with hosts of friend and followers, but the act is all theatre.
Methodology
Rather than define true oneself and how ’s one’s identity looks like, I want to find a way to balance all of them and think about how to represent this conflict.
Form
digital: two-screen videos
physical: gashapon machine and each gashapon represent a different identity/stage. Connect the gashapon machine with Arduino
poster: c4d, water, old tv, mirror, metaphor, vaporwave
Reference:
We live in public – documentary
Life on the Screen – book (Turkle questions how we define life and simulated life.)
Alone together – ebook
http://lauren-mccarthy.com/LAUREN – project – human Alexa (The relationship that emerges falls in the ambiguous space between human-machine and human-human.)
http://flong.com/projects/snout/ – project
Surveillance and Gaze
mind map
Surveillance (political/technological)
Surveillance is the monitoring of behaviour, activities, or other changing information for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting people.
Surveillance is used by governments for intelligence gathering, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime.
Surveillance can be viewed as a violation of privacy, and as such is often opposed by various civil liberties groups and activists.
Gaze (philosophical/psychosocial)
The gaze describes the act of seeing and the act of being seen.
Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society’s mechanisms of discipline.
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at. The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that he or she is a visible object. Lacan extrapolated that the gaze and the effects of the gaze might be produced by an inanimate object (monitor/CCTV?), and thus a person’s awareness of any object can induce the self-awareness of also being an object in the material world of reality. The philosophic and psychologic importance of the gaze is in the meeting of the face and the gaze because only there do people exist for one another.
It is difficult to describe, but I think I am more interested in the gaze, which provides a more philosophical and societal perspective way to discuss issues such as human subjectivity and discipline principle. In other words, rather than talking about the relationship between technology and something, I would like to use technological tools to discuss a cross-discipline subject. Technology is a means to me.
I came up with some questions.
Hell is other people or Heaven is other people?
Two of my friends give the opposite answer to the same situation (watched by people). A feels nervous but B enjoys the feeling of being looked at.
B: I seem to like those very formalistic things and things that are expressed under the lights. For example, I like dancing. Not only the dance itself but also a lot of people watching me under the spotlight. Once these spotlights are taken away and when I found nobody cares my life, I feel like that I have nothing particular interested.
The quote comes at the close of the play No Exit (Huis Clos, in French) which Sartre wrote in 1943. No Exit depicts the arrival of three characters – Garcin, Estelle, and Inez – in hell – which happens to be a drawing room. As the characters struggle to understand what sin has led them to hell, and what their punishment may be, they quickly gather that there is no torturer. No executioner. No flames to burn their souls eternally. It’s just the three of them, trapped in a deadlock. The other characters in the room are the punishment, as it were. The full version of the quote highlights this illustration of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy.
For Sartre, shame is the original feeling brought on by the realization of the existence of others. Sartre uses the example of looking through a keyhole, an act that – according to Sartre – induces a thrill because of the thought that someone might realize that I – the peeper – am looking through the keyhole. In that moment, one sees oneself as other people would see the me: as an object. Shame, in other words, is the shame of oneself in the gaze of the other. It is the crushing realization that I am little more to others than the physical manifestation of my body in their sight. And here intervenes the online code of the game: I am as the number called in bingo, I may not be recalled once I have been pulled out and seen by everyone.
What’s the difference between gazed by artificial eyes and by people?
design museum的仿生机器手臂
What can an environment with potential eyes at any time give birth to?
Interview
Which one makes you more uncomfortable, being gazed by a group of people or a group of machines?
This is the question I asked my friends. Most of them say they would rather be stared by machines because
- eye contact makes people nervous
- eye contact can convey information
- social distance
Overall, stared by people is more uncomfortable (both physically and mentally), but stared by machine is more dangerous.
Also, I talked to Jon Wozencroft who is a senior tutor in RCA Visual Communication during my interview. He introduced me with a very interesting brief and inspired me a lot. The veil in the wedding represents youth and purity, but Muslim women use the veil as being a barrier between the individual wearing it and the person she is trying to communicate with. If we think our screen as a ‘modern veil’, how to design a screen that symbolised something and protects us from being monitored at the same time?
keywords: virtual identity / reflection
Reference
- Panopticon
The Panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The scheme of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, they are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.
In Étant donnés there is nothing that is fixed to the canvas, wood or wall. It is only the onlooker who can ‘fix’ the picture (or the painting). Therefore, the work has no sense or meaning without the onlooker. The picture (or the painting) only exists in the mind of the onlooker. Since there is no common or set image fixed anywhere, there cannot be any common interpretation.
Étant donnés can thus be seen as an extreme alternative to the self-absorbed abstract painting. The abstract painting had turned its back on the onlooker and blocked its own traditional function as a medium, and thus cut itself off from its own onlooker’s insight or interpretation.
keyword: peeping
The performance consisted of the interaction between two policemen mounted on horseback and museum visitors who happened to be on the Turbine Hall bridge. The officers were members of London’s Metropolitan Police and they exercised crowd control techniques on the accidental assembly, corralling people, splitting them into smaller groups and so on.
- Dragonfly Eyes
Created entirely from hundreds of hours of downloadable Chinese surveillance footage. Xu Bing’s innovative editing together of footage found online and Hanno Yoshihiro’s score, which ranges across sentimental Chinese pop and foreboding electro, is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between the people being watched and the machines doing the watching. In this way, the film’s concern is the texture of the present: how the spaces we inhabit and have come to know are increasingly framed by the gaze of others, both human and computer.
Form
Gashapon Machine
Uncertainty and randomicity of virtual identity.
Reading List:
The punitive society by Michel Foucault
Everyone IID student needs to read Foucault. Everyone who cares about human being needs to read Foucault.
Babbling Corpse by Grafton Tanner
People in the 21st century will be accustomed to a state of “anonymous, no entity, but it seems to be a living thing around us” in a social networking environment.
Vaporware.
Initial ideas and development
Some random things I am interested in:
- The relationship between forest and people’s consciousness
- Optical kinetic art
- Unconscious surveillance
- Weight of data (last project) next step: gravitational interaction
- Surveillance mechanism
How online surveillance is brought into people’s attention?
brainstorming on the class
The audience walks into a dark room and is told to monitor a group of people by video. The video is pre-recorded, though. A CCTV in the room will record the body gesture and facial expression of the audience. He/She thinks he/she is tracking people, but he/she is actually be tracked. When he/she walk out of the room and is told the real purpose of this work, and look back the photos/videos recorded by CCTV. It’s kind of discuss the relationship between the tracker and being tracked.
A physical device (includes a mini printer and a type-in screen) which you can connect to your personal account to which analysed and spits out a long list that contains all your information. Temporarily don’t consider the technical issues and digital context, it could be an installation or a sculpture.
‘BDO (Big Dumb Object)’, which is ‘any mysterious object (usually of extraterrestrial or unknown origin and immense power) in a story which generates an intense sense of wonder by its mere existence.’ People seem to be easily attracted to huge things. The principle of computers and artificial intelligence, etc nowadays are also unknown to most ordinary people. A conflict concept between the commonplace and ‘black box’ can be built to reflect the ordinary in the future.
Papaya 