WMDDMWWS — A letter with eyes closed installation
Quick description
This project was created during"Was machen die Dinge(Machinen), wenn wir schlafen?” course in HfK Bremen, inspired by James Bridle's book“New Dark Age”. People tend to blindly trust in blackboxed mysterious technologies, sacrifice their information to unverified Internet sources, use machines to make deeply humanistic actions such as future prediction or alternative medicine computational. Somehow a phone got into a human's trust zone — not only cogitative but also physical — people feel phone heat or vibrations more often than human touches.“A letter with eyes closed” interprets and analyses human's trust and non-visual ways of communicating with technologies. Based on a trust game in which one person tries to decipher the information other leaves on them with a finger, my installation reproduces this action in the dialogue with a machine.
I used an excerpt from this article for the background text of my video
Trust games
Trust games usually make sense once the members of a group know each other a little better or when mutual trust and confidence in each other should be encouraged.
Trust game example: non-visual/audial communication — very intimate, but requires a lot of concetration
Installation
If we stop thinking about visual information, that connects us with other human beings via internet and project their lives, we will feel the physical interaction between us and our devices — a heat, gentle touch of material, felt with ears and skin, and soft vibrations, different for every social media.
So let’s play this trust game with the closest one, the warmest one—with our phone. A dark room, screen brightness is off. There is a place to put your non-dominating hand in, and a screen right in front of your face. You write/sketch/press Digital Touch* with your dominant hand.
Once you finish it, computer/iPad deciphers the information you left on the screen and generates an answer(also a drawing words or just movements).
Dominant hand touches the screen on the left,
non-dominant hand waits for the interaction.
Another hand is in a recess in the wall. Once the answer is generated, sair flow through a straw writes an answer on your hand. You have two options — either you can perceive this answer using your own human feelings and intuition, being satisfied by this almost human-to-human contact.
or you can have a receipt, that contains all the info ai conveyed to you — it would be a rational contact, which will mean that you’re denying this almost human-like connection.
Visitor experience(video in folder 12. A letter with eyes closed)
See a dark room → read an explication/instruction before entering there → sit on a chair → move the screen position regarding of their dominant hand → press on something so the screen starts recording touches → start interaction(described before) → press on something so the screen stops recording touches → wait for an answer which will be transferred on non-dominant hand, there will be also some markers of start/end of the message → visitor either goes and thinks about the message themself
↓or gets a"receipt" with a visualisation of an answer in a special automat
Quick description
Vice article about skin hunger
Trust games
Installation
Visitor experience (video in folder 12. A letter with eyes closed)