In short, the WiFi Killer 2000 is an interactive WiFi Jammer that can chase people and jam the WiFi signal nearby, modified from an old WiFi router.
I am not against having online life, to be honest I spend most of my time online, too, especially in 2020. But it is just a truth that disconnecting, or living offline is much more harder now, not need to compare to 10 years ago, just compare to the days in 2015 or 2016 when IoT and social media are not such huge things.
In my vision, WIFi Killer 2000 is a light joke. The experience of being chased by a moving WiFi jammer might be a bit annoying for those who have business meetings all the time but I believe it is over all funny. I hope when people are trying to run away for it they can also think about these two questions: “Why am I doing this?“ and “Why is it doing this?”
with Karlie ZHAO, Wynn Leung, Joyce GE, Summer Yau
Light, shape, image…
Combining real-life scale laser-cut slices of deformed 3D models of our body parts with the corresponding one-to-one scale drawings and data visualisation patterns, we assemble a “cursed Kirby”.
It can be about lots of things: perception, gender issues, human mechanism and etc. But we don’t claim any here.
“Earths are not flat, Earths are not round, Earths are cubes” – John C ,2020
The idea of creating cubic earths comes from the experience of playing Minecraft when I was younger. Minecraft is totally digital, why not make it possible to create your earths in the physical world? Therefore, I came up with the idea of using a Rubik’s cube to make a changeable earth.
The irregular-shaped Rubik’s cube has 24 different small planes. I made 24 different 3D models of basic elements of the earth (rocks, mountains, trees, strange figures, etc.) to display on each of them. So, you can turn the cube to form your own earth with the different combination of the elements. If you restore the Rubik’s cube to the original form (in this irregular-shaped cube, that means you got 6 big flat planes), bigger models will be shown on the planes, with sun and moon replacing each other every minute – that means on this earth, one day is two minutes in our world. Different relaxing ambient music will also be played according to the appeared planes.
I chose this kind of irregular-shaped Rubik’s cube because it’s cool, when you turns it, different small planes appear on different height, with patterns I designed with the inspiration from the alien graphics in the game Outer Wilds, the cube looks like a relic from an ancient, disappeared civilization.
I think the interaction with a Rubik’s cube is very suitable for an AR artwork, it’s complicated, it requires hands and most importantly, unlike moving markers around the table, it can hardly be done in a totally digital way – it’s highly “tangible”. I think that’s also what AR means to be – a way to add digital contents to highly tangible things.
As a chaotic evil person, you know I would not stop at making peaceful, poetic cubic earths. Therefore, I also made a button, for you to push and blow up the world you built with nuclear bombs.
Chaotic system and fractals are some of the mosts advanced fields of mathematic researches and they are, very likely, the hidden rules that shaping our world.
When humans think they mastered the knowledge about the world, they try to play the role of God. From artificial life to another biosphere, human beings are simulating, or creating another, nature.
This work aims to create an immersive space of generated images and sounds, that give reaction to changes of the environment, temperature, humidity, human/animal passing. Remember what those theories tell us: any minimal action can lead to a brighter future, or the extinction of humanity.
Little Jack is a robot that reads tweets about Covid-19 from twitter and gives different responses in physical world according to the tweets it read. It will give sad faces and noise when the tweets it read are generally negative and give happy faces and noise when the tweets are positive. You can also interact with it to make it happier and it will kill it self if it’s too sad.
This idea came from the current situation: Covid-19 is sweeping all over the world and everyone is now in quarantine, meanwhile, for years we have been addicted to social media and we have let them control our life without noticing this fact. I think this is a good time for us to scrutinise what’s on social media and our relationship with the them.
This is a big, serious topic (social media and us), and I always believe that the best way to let people think about those big topics is not to make a profound speech, but to make a relaxing joke. And Little Jack is a relaxing joke, it makes you smile, and maybe have some thoughts after that, for me that’s enough.
The idea of tangible twitter robot is also very interesting, it’s like a retrograde in this more and more Matrix-like world (Think about it, now we do everything online!). Personally, I think Matrix is somewhere OK to live in, who knows this ‘real world’ is not a huge simulation? But before our technology level get to that point, I think tangible things still have their meanings.
And lastly, something about the suicide button. Here is the situation of Little Jack – it doesn’t have the courage or ability to deal with the social media control, so it can just kill itself. But we can have the courage and ability, as human beings, to make changes.
I always think that we need more humorous in the serious topics to keep people’s interest. And that’s it. You may down load the simulator for yourself to play in the links blow. Note that you need Java8 environment to run it.
Anyway it just a music visualiser that you can use to create some stupid stuffs if you’re a singer or you know how to compose. You can download it for yourself to play via below links. If you want the permission for commercial using, please email me first :p. Do note that you need a Java8 environment to run it.
Hong Kong Night Machine is an installation about light pollution and my personal feeling about it. I record and recompose neon lights and LED advertisements in Monk Kwok, one of the most lit areas at night in Hong Kong. The images are then displayed on a low-resolution LED screen, on which they become abstract. I also record my brainwave during sleepless nights due to the strong light outside the window, then engrave the data onto physical filters that are put in front of the LED screen. The filters further deform the images and merge the data with the light from the screen.
Hong Kong Night Machine is exhibited at Blown Away exhibition in Hall F, Tai Kwun, Central, Hong Kong.
“Social Network” is designed as an installation for exhibitions. The rule is simple: you log in with your unique user name; dislike a video will destroy it( kinda like what happen on YouTube); like a video will improve its quality. Your first experience of the video is based on how many likes and dislikes that the visitors before you gave to this video, when you click like or dislike, you change the experience of the person after you, but also, the corresponding factor will be enlarged to make an immediate change. The idea was inspired by Kojima’s Death Stranding in which Kojima tries to make an experience of feeling connected with others when playing alone. Here is the same, everyone’s experience of the videos is unique, but yet connected with others, when you click like or dislike, you join the network, together to create others’ experience, and that’s where the name comes from.
Let’s talk more about Kojima’s game. In Death Stranding, you could only like other’s buildings/signs or delete them in your own game if you really hate them. So no negative things can be spread. I think that’s kind of unrealistic but the original intention is good. So in my design, you can see who else also like the video if you clicked like, but not so when you clicked dislike.
There are also many details that cost me some time to think about it, like the animation in the start screen. It’s a portrait, but if you stay on this screen for long time enough, you will see it become more any more creepy, unrecognisable. I try to make a metaphor there. But I guess they are all not important.
