The Textbook Of Disappearing is a fun-to-watch useful audio-visual textbook about how to disappear in this digital era, featuring dank humor and bad VFX. No boring lecture, a hundred percent combination of education and entertainment. Published in London, 2023, by the Disappearing Committee.
We rushed into a society with highly advanced digital technologies, but not until recently did we realize that it is a cocoon we created. Smartphones and social media are taking our life away. In this tutorial, you will learn how to take back control in simple steps.
The event aims to push the boundary between virtual and real. In this post-simulacrum era, the boundary is already a bit dissolved. In this background, we examine the virtual as the method of knowing and deconstructing reality. We create this totally fake but somehow existing event to question the meaning of existence and the foundation of our value. We intentionally picked the values in the context of NFT as an example. In this event, the artist is fake, the artwork is fake, and even the frame is fake. However, what does it indicate to be fake? What does it mean to be real? Where does the value of “original” and “authentic” come from?
It may sound weird, but we are glad if you are confused. Thank you for coming tonight and participating in this action. We hope we have brought some new ideas to you.
Akira Minagawa is famous for his insistence on using a hand-drawing process for his textile design.
I created algorithms to try to recreate similar textile textures from purely 0s and 1s, questioning the possibility of digital media and asking the following questions: Can we recreate everything digitally? If so, does it also means that the “real” world we are in can also be another kind of “digital”?
Every morning I wake up, I leave the apartment building, walk along Fa Yuen Street, turn into Soy Street before Sai Yi Street Garden, then turn left to Sai Yi Street, then Shantung St, then Yim Po Fong St. Finally, I arrive at Mongkok East Train Station and take the train to school. And at night I follow the same path but in reverse to get home.
Walking through the streets countless times makes me numb to the surroundings. Everything seems to be so since time immemorial. One day on my way I heard a ship whistle. Suddenly I felt lost for a while, and I could not recognize if I was in Mongkok or Tai Kok Tsui. The sudden confusion was like a spike. I started to pay attention to the shops and people on the streets again. And I found some shops I never noticed and some new neighbors I never met.
Unsounded is a project that makes the spikes. With many small installations that work as knots, it creates a network for sound to travel from one location to another in the local area. The project is also open-source, making it possible for people to participate in making and distributing the devices in their neighborhoods.
Join the project, and create sound portals in your town. Maybe you just help someone to rediscover the community that they have been living in.
With the 5th outbreak of Covid19 in Hong Kong, people are reminded how the lockdown feels like again after having a taste of half a year of freedom. Quarantine soon became a hit word on social media again.
Human beings are not the only ones that are affected. Two robots, Kamala from the states, newly arrived at Hong Kong for its degree, and Philip, a newly local graduate, are also in quarantine.
What will they think and talk about when they are isolated physically? How is it different from us humans?
visit the project website for more information here.
Sonification of live stocks price and the air quality indexes in the cities where the stocks are traded.
Global market is one of the peak creations of capitalism. From New York to Tokyo, then Shanghai, Hong Kong and London. Trading never ends in a day. Many people see this never-stop flow of money, or more exactly, numbers, as the most successful symbol of the globalization of this century.
The AQI (Air Quality Index) data seems to be completely irrelevant to the stocks data. But there was a subtle relation in history, between instrualization, which makes the today global stock market possible, and the environmental issue. It has been well elaborated how developed regions should be responsible for the pollution they make in history, and how the whole global capital system is fueled by burning tons of unnecessary energy.
It is a game. or not a game. You can interact with almost everything in this game, but the only interaction is to see you and the world in their eyes. It is about animism, perspective, watching and being watched.
Explore the little island, walk around, find something, or just simply sit down and watch the sunset.
E-Shredder is a webpage/piece of code, which shows you copies of the most recent sold NFTs, and gradually “destroy” them. More interestingly, itself is an NFT too, so if you buy it, you can witness it destroying itself.
DiVision is a recent outcome of my research of generative art with non-digital elements. In the installation, a customized projection system with prisms, beam splitters, and mirrors is used to create colorful and multi-layer immersive visuals from a digital projector projecting single-channel black and white images.
It is called DiVison because, in the system, the light beams coming out from the digital projector would be divided and altered through the beam splitters and prisms. After setting up the system, I then composed the black and white computer-generated graphic with the concept of division.
