MID- Humanités Digitales

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MONIKER: TOUCH FOR LUCK

Touch for luck is an interactive digital artwork displayed daily on M+ the Hong Kong based Mega Museum. The museum commissioned the design studio Moniker, co-founded by Luna Maurer, and Roel Wouters to create an artwork that people could interact with present on the face of the building. It is 65m tall, and 110m wide, making it one of the largest digital art pieces in the world. The piece in itself is a screen with koi fish, in which the fish are the users interacting with the installation. In order to participate you go on your phone and search Touch For Luck. You then become one of the fish present on the board for anyone in a kilometer radius to see. In order to stay on, you must continuously hold your finger on your phone. The concept itself sounds innocent enough, playful with little tokens of good luck you can win from your continuous participation, but it is this very incentive that highlights a larger theme. The concept of this art installation is rather a commentary on how our current use of technology impacts our lives. The longer you stay on the game, continuously pressing on your screen the more rewards you get. Your popularity grows, you’re on display. In some cases you can even gain influence over other players, or earn breaks depending on how long you've touched the screen. All of these incentives are designed to mimic the touch based habits built throughout our technologically integrated lives. Nowadays it's fairly easy to witness that the majority of people are attached to their smart devices, if not addicted. Social media and certain gamings have similar reward systems and characteristics that keep us hooked staying online whether we really want to or not. This game succeeds at replicating this system because the more you gain the more you wish to stay, and you gain simply by starting. It's like when you open instagram and find yourself two hours later in the same position whether you really meant to or not. There are all these tactics that can work regardless of your awareness, and the game is an example of it. 

I found it to be interesting that a museum wanted to take the opportunity of displaying the largest display of a digital art piece, as a commentary on social behaviors. Using the very technology that it is evoking, to create an appeal to its users is the kind of stark ironic call that actually works to make people realize the bigger picture. Then again, of course we are all aware of the slippery slope of our technological devices. What I think the game highlights effectively then, is the awareness of incentives. Why would we want to stay on? The task is so simple anyone can do it, is it really an accomplishment? But if it's so simple then why not you? Who wouldn't want tokens of good luck, who wouldn't want to participate in a city wide scene interactive display? Packaged as an innocent game accessible to all around makes it an everlasting social experiment. It’s an excellent use of art and technology to comment on its applications to our everyday lives.

Touch for Luck

Multiplayer art game

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JACQUARD INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Yorgo & co, founded by Yorgo Tloupas, is a design studio based in Paris that implemented newly developed technology in a book, giving rise to new ideas of technology embedded in our daily lives. The technology Yorgo used in his book is called Jacquard, exactly like the style of weaving, because it is only with a very advanced system of electronics that make it sensitive to touch and movement. This technology was developed by ATAP, Google's Advanced Technology Projects. The hope of this technology is to eventually create everyday objects or even articles of clothing with this advanced thread allowing different actions such as taking a photo by tapping the strap of your bag, or skipping a song by brushing your sleeve. There are countless possibilities. Three artists, Chloé Bensahel, Amor Muñoz and OMA Space were asked to create installations using this technology to tie the line of art and high tech. The exhibition is featured in this book created by Yorgo & Co, and the book itself uses this technology. The title of the book is woven with this thread sensitive to motion or the touch of a hand picking up the book. It triggered LED lights that have been installed underneath the cloth to create the title. They created a unique typeface inspired by the J of the jacquard technology they applied. The typeface itself is complex and therefore wasn't able to produce every letter in the alphabet but enough so the artists and all that was needed was there. The title of the book is “Prière de toucher le fil.” 

I find this technology very inspiring in itself. It feels like someones taken a new step forward into the integration of technology into our daily lives, not just to be efficient but with its elegance and integrity intact. All the opportunities that are left to explore using this technology interest me greatly. Though I don't know when or perhaps if, this would be available to the majority of the population at least at any given time, it is still nice to see people pushing the boundaries and finding ways to apply it in objects one could have access to such as this book.

Yorgo&Co is a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Paris, led by Yorgo Tloupas, award-winning designer, co-founder of Intersection Maga

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SYNTHETIC EROS

The project Synthetic Eros was created by Chinese designer Zhiqin Lu, also known as Betty Lu. Zhinqin Lu grew up in China, where the subject of sex is largely taboo, both in its expression, and even education. Neither schools nor parents in most cases would educate their children. Through lack of structured education, one has to rely on other sources to understand sexually. In this somewhat unsupervised way of learning, it isn't always easy to make the right distinctions, especially with taboos such as sex. In our day and age, eroticsim, “a philosophical contemplation concerning aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love,” is squandered, with pornography being the counter representation of sexual expression. She makes the distinction that the sole purpose of pornography is sexual arousal through the portrayal of overt, sexual content. While eroticism can represent a deeper meaning of love, connection through the integration of sexual content, pornography is shallow, removed from a context that properly represents sexual partnership, yet the boundary between the two remains slim and difficult to rely on. Today most information is fed to us through algorithms. Sexuality is often represented through a pornographic lens, and when that is the case eroticism culture is lost. With a desire to call attention to this allowance of a taboo to shift our cultural perception of sexuality, came the idea to revive Eros, the Greek god of Love. Art can carry emotion and depth, and reintegrate eroticism and that’s what Zhiqin did through this project.

The project Synthetic Ethos has three components. The first component, which is known as her AI porn, is a sequence created using the Generative adversarial network. She fed the GAN data of plants, landscape photos, abstract paintings, and shunga (erotic japanese) paintings, but no actual pornography. This was to ensure the abstraction and ambiguity of sexuality that would then instead highlight its eroticism through hazy imagery. An explicit imagery would “violate Eros”. The accompanying aspect of this project was a physical device using interactive vibrations that would ignite when touched by the participant. It would translate the sequence she created, but in a hyper speed to create the sensation that you and the device are engaging in the erotic experience together, which creates another layer of intimacy and closeness, counteracting the effects of a cultural taboo. Lastly with this concept she developed an animation inspired by “Studies in Perception I” by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton in 1967. They created a nude image using electronic symbols. Their piece was a landmark being the first published nude in the New York Times. She created her animation with the similar idea of using electron symbols that would move and create erotic shapes and interactions via UNICODEs. The animation was created to balance perceptibility with censorship. The unicode was created from Chinese erotic idioms to give the least possible amount of information that could still properly represent Eros.

Her work was impactful to me not only for the ambitious exploration of cultural taboos but how carefully thought out and integrated the concept was in each step of the process. Having a reason for how the sequence moves, as well as the coding itself. The concept was represented throughout its creation resulting in an impactful and beautiful outcome. Having interactive aspects only further transmits the concept, allowing oneself to come face to face with such a repressive taboo. As technology is becoming increasingly integrated in all aspects of culture, more incongruities will be fed to us through algorithms that without proper attention can further shape the way a culture perceives and portrays itself from the large scale to each of its individuals. Having art that calls on taboos will forever be critical to the advancements and preservation of morals through society. 

Betty Lu, 卢芷钦

Designer + Creative Coder based in UK and China.