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.
2010年，Ulf Schleth上線了一個網站給大家來“埋葬”一些文件，這個網站叫 /death/null。這也是本項目直接的靈感來源。在/death/null上Ulf Schleth寫了這樣一段話：“it’s for digital romanticists, it’s about living and dead ideas and everything in between. （這個網站是為在數碼世界中找尋浪漫的人而建， 這個網站是關於生與死與所有生死之間的事物的。）”網塋背後的想法類似而略有不同，網塋嘗試探詢記憶與紀念的意義。在皮克斯的電影Coco中，當一個人不再被世人記起時，他/她就真正死去了。也許對於網站來說也是這樣。
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.
