Matthew Ross
Hyper Engagement is a collection of artistic interventions that aim to uncover hidden materiality in how communications technologies mediate our interpersonal relationships. Each of these projects aim to make tangible a hidden emotional choreography which tools like texting, video chats, and social media engage us in. I do this by taking traditional design affordances of these technologies and taking them to an absurd extreme.
Description
In order to take these mediums to their extremes, I decided to pull out the facets of these tools that cause myself the most anxiety.
First with texting, it has always confused me to whether this exists as a synchronous or asynchronous workflow. Texting exists in the fine line because it is instantaneous, but doesn’t require the traditional acknowledgements that come with synchronous communication. This fine line leads to common texting tropes like being left on read, double texting, and ghosting. To me there exists a confusing etiquette and choreography that texting brings us to. In order to address this I decided to build two projects that focus respectively on responding to texts, and waiting for texts.
The Notifier is a wearable that forces me to respond immediately to my text messages. Every time I get a text message a motor activates that applies suggestive force to my ear by tugging it down. By applying force to myself whenever I get a text message, I am forced to respond to all of my text messages as soon as they come, making sure I never forget them again.
Read Receipts is an intervention that reframes your notifications. The app monitors your text conversations and every 30 seconds a computer synthesized voice tells you how long it’s been since another person has responded to you. This app aims to experiment with the strange line that texting exists in the space between synchronous and asynchronous communication.
Next, I wanted to investigate the medium of VideoChats as they have begun to dominate daily life in the wake of the COVID19 Pandemic. I was really interested in the underlying machine learning technologies companies like Zoom and Google are using to monitor our conversations, and the lines between the explicit rules that services make us sign to use them, and implicit rules that we abide by culturally.
Filter Bubble is an experimental Videochat app that uses optimization algorithms to make sure people in the chats are talking about interesting subjects. Each day the app scrapes the most popular trending topics on Twitter and uses those words to build a corpus of what is considered interesting. Users of the Chat App will be required to keep their conversation on topic with what Filter Bubble is asking of them, otherwise they will get muted.
Finally Give and Take Chat is a Video Conferencing app that changes the dynamics of how our conversations operate. The App allows each participant to speak for 40 seconds each. When one users time is up, their microphone will shut off and the other users mic will turn on. This cycle continues for the duration of the chat.
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https://mattross.live