Chinese

Speak, Pen is a web-based art tool programmed in JavaScript. It’s a drawing tool that replaces the traditional paintbrush with custom text inputs. Users are free to use text on the canvas to make visual poetries, interactive drawings, and performances, etc. The work explores the materiality of text, and ways in which users experiment with texts beyond their semantic functions.

Created during a radical tool workshop at SFPC, Speak, Pen takes inspiration from other “radical” tools that encourage DIY spirit and playfulness. It is not just a digital drawing tool, but rather, a community that aims to inspire makers to experiment with texts beyond their daily functions. It is something that can be performed, alone, or alongside others. I intend to blur the lines between users and the creators or mediators of a platform. Our community guidelines are based not on rules for how to use the text brush, but examples of how past audiences have experimented with it. The meaning of the works lies not within the interpretation of the texts in the drawings, but the different engagements with the tool within and outside its community.

(Source: ELO 2021)

Robopoem@s consist of five insect-like robots whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem@ (“poema” in Spanish) written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (my original Spanish with English translations by Kristin Dykstra). Voice activation, micro-mp3 players, and response to sensors (reactive to obstacles) allow these quadrupeds to interact with humans and with each other, emphasizing the existential issues addressed in the poem. The final segment of the poem, number VII, re-phrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations.

The project explores the politics of erasure and the temporality of voices within the context of digital authoritarianism. Unerasable Characters II presents the sheer scale of unheard voices by technically examining and culturally reflecting the endlessness, and its wider consequences, of censorship that is implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.

The project collects unheard voices in the form of censored/erased (permission denied status via the official API) text, including emojis, symbols, English and Chinese characters, which is based on one of the biggest social media platform in China called Weibo. A daily scraping script is used to fetch those text via Weiboscope, a data collection and visualization project, developed by Dr. Fu King Wa from The University of Hong Kong, in which the system has been regularly sampling timelines of a set of selected Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers or whose posts are frequently censored.

Consisting of a custom-software (written in Python and p5.js) that scrapes the erased “tweets” from Weiboscope on a daily basis, the project presents the archives in a grid format. Each tweet is deconstructed into a character-by-character display that occupies a flashing unit for a limited period. The duration of each ‘tweet’ is computed from the actual visible time on Weibo, and the visual will transform from a busy canvas to an empty one with all disappearance of text. The program will then fetch a new set of archives and the cycle will repeat endlessly. It takes an average of 4 hours per cycle to empty the screen.

Unerasable Characters II raises questions regarding not only data capture from a corporational perspective, but also the matters of who might be the readers in digital platforms like Weibo, and even the wider influential audio and web conference platform like Zoom, where online events were being censored globally. The project further points to the operations of censorship that requires different levels of collaboration between corporations, states, human labours, the intelligence of machines and algorithms, but more importantly is to examine the contested notions of "violation of policies" (rule of law) as the seemingly common argument of corporations, as well as wider issues of censorship and the threats to free speech and academic freedom.

Yuefu is a poetry generation system using OpenAI’s GPT, a Generative Pre-Trained natural language model pretrained on Chinese newspapers, that is fine-tuned with classical Chinese poetry. The developers write in their paper describing the system that it does not use "human crafted rules or features," or "any additional neural components". The system can generate poems in various formal, classical styles.  

The example shown is translated by Ru-Ping Cheng and Jeff Ding for the ChinAI newsletter. It is an example of Cang Tou Shi, a Chinese version of acrostic poems. "In this case," the translator explains, "the first words of each line form the title of the poem: 神经网络 (neural networks)." Some other examples of the system's output are shown in a preprint published by the system's creators, and a translation of a Chinese newspaper article (entered into ELMCIP) provides translations of more examples.  

Robopoem@s are robots created by Tina Escaja. Robots that are designed to take the apearance and function of poems, able to move, and even "speak" different poems.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe. World of Warcraft takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous Warcraft release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.(Source: Wikipedia)

Described by the author as "an online philosophical poetry toy for poets and philosophers from the age of four up." The piece jumbles the letter of the word "meaning" in space, allowing the reader to manipulate their motion in space.

Published also on Macromedia's DHTML Zone, DOC(K)S (France), & Cauldron and Net.