Posted on

台北夢Taipei Dreams

Erase for new interpretation, 台北夢Taipei Dreams is an interactive website that contains more than 50 erased stories of people who have come to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

s

https://vimeo.com/418902703

Description

Entering, assimilating, and then reinterpreting, the experience of accommodating to a new city is conceptually aligned with both the technical and poetic process of erasure poetry—a text being encountered, read, and eventually “erased” in forming new interpretations of an existing narrative. Taipei is like no others, but as one index city seems to entail a common metropolitan theme built up with the burdens of people’s ambitions and aspirations on a scale of different visibilities. These stories of “dreams” come from mostly university students/graduates around my age who have moved to Taipei for work or study. With a lot of comparings and imitations in the highly competitive environment, it seems like many are subconsciously living out the stereotypes of what they expected people in Taipei would be like. Perhaps, the biggest stereotype is that Taipei is an absolute place of dream-come-true as they first entered in their own processes of wayfinding, where “dreams” are in fact very much overlapped. The diverse yet homogenized complexity of these stories have to deal with the dynamic between collectivism and individualism. Each story is of one unique person, but comes together as one.

Taking the form of erasure poetry as part of the social practice of this project, I hope to explore the dynamic from a personal perspective. By translating and erasing others’ stories whose original texts were in Traditional Chinese, I have entered a virtual space of the city of embedded dreams, and finding my very own reinterpreted from others’ real life endeavors. The website not only provides a freely explorative experience, but a collection of city experiences, which does not have the magic to achieve one’s dreams, but through interactive engagements invites people to reflect on their own encounters. Through 台北夢, we could be closer to our dreams.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.401.1
Capstone Studio (Shanghai)
Culture,Narrative/Storytelling
Posted on

The Final Blessing

From the first words one may speak as an infant, to the last statement one may make on the execution bed, a timeless space in-between is created, questioning what “the final blessing” entails.

s

https://vimeo.com/418781754

Description

Texas is the state with the most executions in the US, with 569 in total up to date. These last statements from the executed offenders are controversially public information, but the dataset is pretty well-known and widely used. Bearing in mind the debate between justice and humanity, my project’s concept largely has to come to the evaluation of what is to be included versus what to be excluded. It’s also a dynamic between the collective “offenders” and each offender’s individuality. I decided to focus on the statements without the stereotypes of a person’s race, gender, etc. The other dataset from Stanford, A wordbank of children’s first words, came across immediately as an introspection of the thinking process. First words in life to last words in life. By cross-matching and visualizing the two datasets, the project creates a space for ponders of a person’s lifetime journey. We all become the witnesses of this final blessing as a symbolic act of rebirth, for the offenders or the victims. The project utilizes the features of different “time indicators” from the last words dataset: time of offense, time received sentence, etc. to visualize the seemingly definable extents of what happened and the timeless personal and social collective influences.

Is an act forgiven once the final sentence is executed? Is this a blessing for the offenders or the victims? Or perhaps, for us who are indirectly related to this social process? This website creates a space of imagination, contemplation, and introspection, from one's birth to death.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.204.1
Critical Data & Visualization
Narrative/Storytelling,Social Good/Activism