The intervention is simple. On a weekend, I blocked Vinewood Boulevard, which is the busiest road, in the game Grand Auto Theft V Online with a bus. Then I (controlled my character) climbed up onto the bus, and started to play the recording of Jane Fonda’s speech about the war in Vietnam she gave in LA in 1972 to the game world through the online voice chat.
It is very interesting to see how other players and the game react to this and try to stop me. As the game is about (being) criminals, NPCs in GTAV are programmed to be rude, violent and aggressive. Many people have criticized this. For sure this is quite messed up, in a sense, but what probably more messed up is that, this also somehow “programmed” the player to be more aggressive and violent in the game.
Accident happens inevitably. During a leak some substances from ourside enter digital world no.05A35. This specific instance of Platystomata was found after the incident.
We found Ommatoporifera in a hidden corner, somewhere like Mariana Trench on the earth, in the digital world no.05A35. We still don’t know we should call this instance (or these instances) of Ommatoporifera it or they. But seems that the division is not a form of reproduction.
Visitors’ heartbeats will be detected and recorded by a customized circuit and DIY sensors. Then the data is used to generate sound and visuals. The visuals will be projected to a shallow, reflective dish filled with water through a triangular prism. A speaker is placed under the dish through which the sound is played to disturb the water, then deform the projected graphic.
By visualizing the invisible heartbeats and using this very personal data as the input of a computer-free generative system, a connection between the visitor and this piece is established. This project also tries to echo the theme of generative art made with physics rules, which I have been interested in and working on for a period of time.
The limitation of behaviours in public spaces from the government seems to be a common and normal component in modern communities. However, if we observe at different cities with the focus of signs in public areas, we may find that their content is highly sensitive to the urban context, leading us to reflect on the definition of “public space”, and to question the normality of these oppressive public signs. After collecting rich language materials from the streets in field trips and research, we designed a series of posters and stickers, trying to mock the nonsensical governmental road signs/banners in public spaces. We hope that the posters and stickers will serve as a voice from the public that indirectly responds to the authoritative, centralised power from the government.
Expanding city is progressively invading wild, and villages, to build its own colonial empire.
At the same time, the populace of the city empire flood to the countryside every weekend, enjoying the clean air, leaving tons of trash, and taking away fresh fruits and vegetables.
On a Saturday, I went to Ma Shi Po, a village that recently lost its farmland to property developers. Five items are collected, put into well-sealed plastic bags with marks of the location and time of them being picked up, and brought back to my apartment in the center of the city.
In two weeks, those items are isolated in their own little plastic bag, rootless, decaying in a totally unfamiliar environment.
Pillows in the modern days have long been associated with comfort, relaxation, and even health care. They are designed to maximize their functions of comforting people during sleeping, with a number of complicated ergonomic estimations.
Comparing the headrest from the Song dynasty and the pillows we use today, it’s not difficult to find that there are essential differences in what people actually take them as. The headrests from ancient China were often made of hard, cold ceramics or wood, and the sophisticated patterns on their surfaces indicate its aesthetic value and the owners’ social status, apart from its functions.
Yet, what is the boundary of a “pillow”, physically and functionally? Does a pillow have to comfort its users? What do people expect more from a pillow than a “headrest”? For example, can it “record” and visualize the sleeping quality of the user, or can it help people who suffer from insomnia fall asleep more easily?
We did notice that the pillow has some specialities that other daily used objects don’t: Short distance (i.e. intimacy): people get tightly close to the surface of the pillow when putting their heads on it, making it possible for them to perceive tiny signals and messages (sound/smell/…) that come from the pillow itself; Long time & long-term: most people keep close contact with their pillows for quite a long time every day, and use the same pillow for plenty of months or years. Through these, in a sense, some relationships can be built between the user and the pillow.
Those led us to think of Animism, which is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. While the terminology was developed in the late 19th century, this idea of “perceiving all things as animated and alive” can be found in the ancient cultures around the world, and is one of the earliest, if not the first, concept in anthropology.
It is very interesting to think about how we can combine these ideas and reflect back to the headrest from the University Museum Art Gallery. And overall, the target and core concept of our project is to question that, can we make a pillow that pleases and disturbs its user at the same time?
So, yes. This is a pillow with the shape of a strange creature; it’s half-bio half-machine, with reference to the T-800; it has tattoos derived from classic Chinese erotica art under its skin, and it will make strange sounds when you put your head on it.
Or in other words, it is alive, and it seems to be concerned about the fertility rate of human beings.
Follow the grave digging bot on Twitter (It has stopped being active on Twitter due to the new policy Elon Musk brought to Twitter, but it is still making graves. It might move to Mastodon in the future.)
The Internet, as one of the essential systems or things in human society today, is incredibly young. The first website that everyone can saw was created in 1991, which’s creation also marked the birth of the Internet we are so used to nowadays.
So, this year, this dear friend of ours turns 30. In Chinese culture, entering one’s 30s is called 而立, which means one has entered the golden age of their life and has obtained knowledge and skills for him/her/them to create his/her/their own values.
The Internet grew much faster than us human, as of now (17 May 2021, 6:31 pm UTC +8). There has been 491,720,368 registered domain, and this number keep going up every millisecond.
Internet Graveyard is a project to try to define and keep “memory” of the Internet. Only 251,223,483 domains out of the 491,720,368 ones are active, which means about 50% of the domains, and the websites on them, are gone.
In 2010, Ulf Schleth create a website for people to bury their files call /death/null. This is the direct inspiration for me to create this project. Schleth wrote on the about page of /death/null: “it’s for digital romanticists, it’s about living and dead ideas and everything in between.” The idea behind Internet Graveyard is similar, but not the same: Internet Graveyard is about memory and memento. In the Pixar film Coco, one becomes truly dead when no one in the world remembers him/she/they. Maybe it’s the same for a website.
A little bot, creating graves to memorize those websites that no longer exist and announce their death on Twitter. It works days and nights, but making a grave takes 12 hours, so it can only make two graves a day. At the same time, there are 250 million sites that are already dead, and this number goes up every minute. The job is never gonna be finished, but the poor little bot still digging, making a grave for every dead site, no matter how small it was, where it was registered in and what language it used. —— I think this scenario is sadly romantic and poetic, and that’s exactly what I want to do in this project.
山海經 (ShanHanJing, The Book Of Mountains and Seas) and 博物誌 (BoWuZhi, The Encyclopaedia of Strange Things) are ancient Chinese books that describe myths and mountain, people, strange things in myths. They are also two of the first books that I read as a little boy that deeply impress me with all the stories that appear to be super cool and novel to a little kid. At that time I would be scared because I thought 刑天 (a character in 山海經, he kept fighting after his head is cut off and used his nipples as eyes and his navel as mouth (to yell)) is real.
My drawing of 刑天
For a long time in China, and I would say even now, the books like those two are described as books that are useless, because they write about monsters and non-realistic things, but not “serious” theories or “useful” techniques, which is contrary to Confucius’ words (“子不語怪力亂神”). But in my childhood and even now, they give me joyful experience.
They wonder outside the mainstream, finding value in the outside to tease at the pedantic mainstream. They ,also, in a way, represent the unlimited imagination, which I think is lack in today.
As a reader of these two books, I am surprised to see the outcome of the algorithm, it’s something familiar, yet new. It’s happy to see 鮫人 (they are half fish half human, their tear will become pearl) from 博物誌 and 相柳 ( he has 9 heads and a dark-green snake body) in 山海經 appear in a same story. I also want to give a interesting experience for those who have not read the books yet. I hope the generated stories can inspire their imagination, lead them into a strange but colourful world.
Use Rita library; text from 中國哲學書電子化計劃 https://ctext.org and 中華古詩文古書籍網 https://www.arteducation.com.tw; pictures from 新浪 sina.com; a sound from free sound.org; more details in code comment
The original pillow was used during the summer so as to get relief from the summer heat, and it’s also described as neck rests intended to protect a woman’s elaborate coiffure while sleeping. As it’s made with ceramic, it is hard & uncomfortable to sleep on. Ice , somehow, inherit those historical used and physical characteristics, and even push some of them to extreme (for example, the uncomfortableness).
In short, Expanded Theatre is a performance project merging science and art, in which sound, visual elements, and the hydrodynamic quantum analogs are involved.
When I saw the video of walking droplets for the first time, I was shocked and amazed. The phenomenon is like a glitch in the Matrix, giving such a feeling of unreal; but at the same time, the elegant bouncing, walking, dancing droplets also create a unique aesthetic. As the video went on, I started to imagine the bath as a stage in a theatre, and the droplets as performers presenting themselves to me. Thus, I came up with the name “Expanded Theatre”. During my experiments of recreating the phenomena with soap and water, I observed the ways of how the droplets move, and the imagination changes: they are more like people dancing freely and uninhibitedly in a nightclub than rigid performers on a formal and dignified stage. So, I decided to make it into a performance that includes DJ, VJ, living coding, and the incredible droplets, but the name “Expanded Theatre” is kept, as I thought it still describes the work well, and it’s cool.
In 2019 I had a chat with an artist in Zurich and he said that in all the art and science projects, the artists seem to tend to just grab what the scientists have found as material/media of their work. I try to do this project in another way: at first, I did a lot of experiments, and really tried to understand the phenomenon as well as the mechanism behind it, and tried to get inspiration for the art project in the experimenting process. I think this might be a better way: with more understanding and knowledge from the science part, art and science merge better, and the result is more surprising.
