User:Tutu Guo

Practice Digital Craft 2nd Year

project 1 : On the Body

Inspiration: Eyes form body, Lines and parallax 

I experimented with lines and solid geometry. Started with the question: how can the balance of the human body be influenced? Research showed the organ in our body controlling balance is the inner ear, and eyes work from visual. As we all know that eyes are not as “honest” as we thought, and they can actually handle some issue in a way of “lying” to us. I started to think how can I use this ability of eyes to influence the vision and balance.

project 2

Collaborated with Koen.

We edited a collaboration of videos about electric shock which uses three monitors. We first collected as much movie clips as possible and divided by categories: Torture, Protection, Science, Accidents, Magical and Treatment. The first screen, plays basic information, title. The second one, which is the main one plays full-scale movie clips. And the third one plays our edited exaggerating clips.

We attempted to draw a discussion about the usage of physical reaction in movies. Obviously, lots of clip we used largely exaggerated this reaction to achieve the expected results and pleased audience. Yet I doubted the scientificity of those clips.

project 3: Mind of Machine

Collaborated with Thijs.

Concept: Inspirited by cross section photos, what we considered this as the way of machines “looking at” things. An object can contain as many cross section photos as possible, we transferred this idea into a booklet. As for the object, apple is a basic fruit which has similar shape and size. Production: We sliced an apple as thin as possible and scanned it every time, edited the images and made it into a booklet.

MICA

Fake smile? Real Smile? In the MICA workshop, we as a group made an interactive installation. It has a face recognition which will react when you have a smile on your face. In the black box we put a smile which you have to smile to, once the face recognition recognise your smile the box will fart which hopefully you will get the joke and have a real smile instead. AI has largely been used, and certain worries show up. In our case we created an installation that will only react when people fit its own standard. Think about the reality that AI will only serve us when we meet the criterion.

What is my craft?

What is my craft?

What craft I want to use in Q10?

Based on my previous experience, I shortly work on Arduino and processing. In Q9, I did not have much opportunities to learn new programmes but I did made a list of programs I want to have basic knowledge about.

Arduino and processing for me, are the basic programmes for interaction design, so they would be the first two. I had some courses before, so I know how the language and logic in them work. I know that they are very necessary for most of the interaction work.

Apart form that, I am learning MAX by watching tutorials. I used it in one quarter in second year, the final visual work went very well. The patcher was helped by Thomas (who’s not at the interaction station any more), which took about half a day to finish. It started quite easy, and I found its language is pretty easy to adapt to.

For medium, I rarely used sensors, so that will be one on my list. I like to work with videos and the ways to present them, which means I would like to deepen in tools such as projector and monitor. For projectors, it sometimes can work as a way to communicate the space as well.

What is the position of my practice in relation to newer technologies?

I think the potential of new technologies can be promoting new concept, and creating interaction with audience. In digital craft I can somehow approach them easily and use them for my projects.

Besides, making is a process completes my concept. Normally, in a project, I firstly deepen in the topic, conduct solid research, found out the problem and build my concept based on them. For next, I sketch out my concept and specify it. Before actual making, a plan will come out first. Yet the plan does not always work and changes happen quite occasionally. And these changes, somewhat improve my concept and the combine the actual work and concept. Constructing concept is like writing script and making it is like shooting movies.

What theme I will explore for my Q10 project？

The theme I want to work on will be cognitive bias.

A cognitive bias refers to the systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.

Few years ago, I have already been noticed that some people nowadays in the society easily discuss things they barely have any knowledge about and draw to conclusion. I was shock by that, and thinking about they will even react based on their thought even concerns me.

Instead of making strong statement, I prefer to trigger my audience in the way of giving them what I have been noticed and point out the problem. I found out that giving them a question to think about is more effective. File:Scanned from a Xerox multifunction device.pdf

Q10: How to be human?

For this project, I want to experiment with ideography. This was driven by the curiosity of people surround me who cannot read my mother language, which keeps me wonder how this feeling will be.

I first researched different ideographs, from ancient to modern. I tried to combine a number of them and make them readable to people who don't speak. But it did not work out.

work by Xu Bing

I started to research different artwork of ideography, characters, and languages. Inspired by artist Xu Bing and one of his artwork Tian Shu. I came up with an idea to create an alphabet which can be used by both Chinese and English.

The first version of the alphabet.

For the first version, I place the letter in the corresponding Chinese character.

Finished version