1.The Winter Market:
There is a machine that can capture the environments of someone’s imaginary world. They can be some memories of the past, imaginations of the future, some dreams that emerge when the person was sleeping, or entirely groundless fantasies. The machine can accept and show these imaginary images as they exist in someones’ mind. When showing, it can use some special technologies, such as holographic laser projection, and maybe the use of sound and wind and temperature control, to make the presentation quite immersive. For example, if I once went to Tibet and I really want to experience the unforgettable travel again, I could use the machine to make the landscape, the sunlight (not only light, but also warmth), the breeze on the plateau reappear again.
However, this can also cause serious problems. As far as I’m concerned, if someone wants to read and show another world in another person’s mind with that person’s permission, it can be seen as a severe violation of that person’s privacy.
2. Newton’s Sleep
In the novel, since the environment on earth has been uninhabitable extremely elite people build themselves a spaceport called Spes and live there, abandoning those who are intellectually inferior. Rationalism cannot solve all the problems. I want to make an artifact that calls back people’s empathy and memorizes people on earth. People in Spes can enter their personal information into a program and the program can find out where their hometown is and show them how it currently looks like, how the life of people living there is, the number, names and ages of earth people living there, and if there was any social/relative relationship between the elite people and some of the earth people, or relationship between people in their families. Maybe there can be a little cube that enables the elite people to have an immersive experience of living on earth.
This artifact may only cause some emotional changes or some humanistic thinking, it cannot solve the problem in a short time. Actually for me I cannot see how can the problem be solved easily. Also, I think it need to collect a mass of data.
3.The Fish of Lijiang:
Aging looks fearful, either in our real society or in this fiction. I’m thinking about making an interactive artifact that attaches some humanistic care to the anxiety of aging. If we can change aging to some kind of art, it may not look as terrible as how it feels like. There can be a camera to capture people’s faces and extract the trace on someone’s face that shows age, such as wrinkles and age spots. After analyzing, the installation can draw a beautiful painting based on lines and spots captured, by making changes and/or adding other elements.
Maybe privacy is also an important point that we can consider when playing with this installation because it has to capture people’s facial information. Besides, I haven’t come up with other problems yet.