Tag: social media

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Leung Man Tao: “Naai Gong” or “Gang Du”

2021, webpage/software

中文版網頁

Visit the original page.

Below is a embedded version of the work, might need a few seconds to load.

This is a work related to the social movement in Hong Kong in 2019. It is also about the subtle effects brought by the fact that there is different spoken languages and writing script of Chinese, especially in the context of Hong Kong and Mainland China.

The source text is written by Leung Man Tao (梁文道). A writer and critic who is active in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He was attacked by some people online from both Hong Kong and Mainland China for his neutral stand in the social movement in 2019. He’s the only public figure I know that received attacks from both regions, and after reading posts from the attackers, I noticed that, although the people who attacked him from Hong Kong and Mainland have very different ‘political stands’, behind the stands, they have very similar logics and ways of thinking. This work, to some degree, tries to show, explore, and raise questions about these similarities.

I collected Leung’s essays published in 2019 (the ones in traditional Chinese are published in Hong Kong, and the ones in simplified Chinese are published in Mainland China), tokenized the essays into sequences of words with a customized Chinese tokenizer (which is based on CC-CEDICT dictionary) and put them into a simple Markov model to generate new paragraphs.

Most of Leung’s articles in 2019 are about serious topics like politics, culture, and art, but after going through the Markov model, the generated text appears to be, somehow, meaningless, absurd, confusing, and ridiculous. I like this contrast because it somehow reminds me of the fact that the Internet (which is also the space where the attacks happened) is deconstructing discussions. That is not necessarily a good thing or necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how we react. With the deconstruction, can we jump out of the existing perceptions and stereotypes? And after deconstructing, can we find a way back to the original question and settle down on an answer?

Reflect on one essay in the input of Leung about Cantonese, and the fact that in recent years Cantonese has been given a kind of political meaning. I wrote an algorithm to randomly choose two words in the text, replace one of them with a word that sounds similar to it in Mandarin (in simplified Chinese), and do the same to the other but with Cantonese (and traditional Chinese), then repeat the process every few seconds. Due to historical reasons Mandarin, simplified Chinese, and Mainland China are closely bound together, and so are Cantonese, traditional Chinese, and Hong Kong, although there is a population in Mainland China that speak Cantonese and write in simplified script and vice versa in Hong Kong. This impression, or stereotype, of spoken languages and writing scripts, creates boundaries for people to discuss and understand. 

The algorithm makes the text change slightly over time. After a while, because of the replacements, the text becomes more and more senseless in terms of the literal meaning of the characters, but since the replaced words share the same or a similar pronunciation with the original ones, the visitors can still guess what words were in the places before and then get a fuzzy idea of the unreplaced text.

What happened to the text is a metaphor for what happened to Leung (and others) in real life: people quote, then ‘interpret’ and twist, what he (and they) wrote/said to support their opinions on him (and them), then A’s twisted quotation is quoted by B, and B’s by C… The meaning of the words in their quotation goes further and further away from the original one. Thus, it is harder and harder for people to get to the original idea of the text. 

It is also a metaphor for the more and more divided society. With algorithms on social media and the instigation from some individuals and groups, the space for neutral opinions is lost. You are either part of us or the enemy. There is no place in between, and there is nothing in common between “us” and the enemy. Thus, the possibility of discussion and negotiation is gone. Only hate and attack are left.

Pronunciation data collected from open Cantonese dictionary, CC-Canto database and CC-CEDICT database, pre-processed by me.

ScreenShots (Click on the picture to view the original resolution version)

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To the GitHub Repo of this work

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梁文道是“奶共”還是“港獨”

2021, 網頁/軟件

English version

點此前往原網頁。

下面是embedded的版本，需要一段時間載入

這是一個關於2019香港社運的作品。它同時也是一件關於一國兩文兩語所帶來的微妙遺產的作品。

源文本來自梁文道，一位活躍於中國內地，香港和台灣的作家和評論家。由於他在2019年的社會運動的中立立場，他同時遭到了部分香港人和部分內地人的攻擊。他是我認識的唯一一個受到來自兩個地區的攻擊的公眾人物。在這之中我觀察到，儘管香港和內地的攻擊他的人有著非常不同的“政治立場”，在他們的立場背後，是非常相似的邏輯和思維方式。這個作品試圖在某種程度上展示，探索和詢問這些相似之處。

梁文道在2019年發表的大多數文章都有關嚴肅的話題，比如政治，文化和藝術。但是經過Markov模型的重塑之後，所生成的文本在某種程度上是無意義，荒謬，令人困惑和可笑的。這在我看來是互聯網消解嚴肅討論這一事實的影射。這不一定是好的，也不一定是壞的。這完全取決於我們的反應。通過解構的過程，我們可以跳出現有的觀念和陳規嗎？而在解構之後，我們能否回到問題本身並找到一個答案？

回應源文本中一篇討論廣東話和普通話的文章以及以及近年來廣東話被賦予了某種政治意義的這一事實，我寫了一個算法，每隔數秒，將生成的文本中的兩個詞，一個替換為在普通話中同音或近音的詞（替換為簡體中文）， 一個替換為廣東話中同音或近音的詞（替換為繁體中文）。由於某些歷史原因，普通話，簡體字和大陸綑綁在了一起，廣東話，繁體字和香港亦然（雖然在大陸有大量講廣東話寫簡體字的人口，在香港亦有大量講普通話/國語寫繁體字的人口）。這種語言和文字的固有觀念或是偏見，實際上為兩地人的互相溝通和理解帶來阻礙。

算法使文本隨著時間的流逝漸漸變化。一段時間後，由於詞的替換，文本在字面上變得越來越無意義，但是由於被替換的詞與原來的詞具有相同或相似的發音，因此觀眾仍然可以猜到以前在那個地方的詞是什麼，並對原本的文本有一個模糊的概念。

文本所發生的事情是對梁文道（及其他人）在現實生活中所遇到的事情的隱喻：人們引用，並「解釋」與扭曲，他寫/說的內容，來支持他們對他的看法，然後乙引用甲的引文，而丙引用乙的引文……所以他們口中的作者的話語的意義與作者本身想表達的意義越行越遠，而人們亦越來越難以從中讀出作者原本的思想。

這也是對這個越來越分裂，“二極管化”的社會的隱喻。 社交媒體的算法以及一些個人和團體的煽動，使得中立意見的空間丟失了。 你要么是“我們”的一部分，要么是“敵人”的一部分。 不存在兩者之間的位置，“我們”和“敵人”之間也沒有任何共同點。 這樣，討論和談判的可能性就沒有了。 只剩下仇恨和攻擊。

讀音數據收集自粵語開放詞典，CC-Canto和CC-CEDICT，經過處理

截圖（點擊查看大圖）

點此前往其GitHub頁面

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My Tree Friend

Participatory Project, 2020

The work encourages human participants to make friends with trees, to talk to it and to hug it, during which a situation of human and tree (nature) participate together is created and relationships between humans and trees are formed.

Visit its website: here

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Little Jack

A tangible twitter robot, 2020

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.

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Social Network

code, installation, 2019

“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.