Group Research Project: Reading & Imaginary Interactive Artifact

The Veldet

In the short fiction, the nursery room, along with other technologies, alienates kids from their parents. On the contrary, I would propose an installation that bring broken people back to together. A chamber that aims to cure and conciliate people’s psychological wounds. 

Before a patient comes to the chamber, his case would be studied thorougly by a group of psychologists (the parent’s nice neighbor), who will reappear the scene where the incident happened. In the chamber, he will return to his memory, recountering the very scene that causes his trouble. Instead of manifesting the scene exactly as how it was, the patient’s physiological indicators are monitored in real-time. If any over stress occurs, the virtual characters would act less aggressively, allowing the patient to overcome the very situation. As the patient faces the situation iterally, he may regain confidence.

I have seen similiar design in Captain America’s movie: Civil War. The prototype Tony Stark’s showing here only manifest the story faithfully. In our nursery curing room, patients now can interact with their memory. The installation should help many with their mental problems. However, people may well then readily stuck in their memories, unwilling to get out. Just like the way Cobb has to dream to see his long-gone lover every day, in the movie Inception.

 

The Plague

The sci-fi story depicts a plague that will turn infected people into stone-like, but actually alive creatures. This new form of life, sensing time differently from human, is not accepted by human beings, who choose to incinerate them all. 

The woman says something thought-provoking, that “we cannot deprive them of the right to exist because they move slow”, which leads us to the ethic of killing. How do we justify killing other creatures? The artifact I bring to this world is an installation, including a VR goggle and a receptacle that one may fit his or her body into. The artifact features the ability to simulating how slow creatures sense time. It creates a virtual world in which everything appears to be really fast around the viewer. In order to make viewer’s movement slow accordingly, the receptacle uses servo motors, that viewers could only move in extremely slow pace. Adding on to that, the servo motors allow the installation to mimic how stone-man perceive human’s action on them. It could life you up and down, tilt you left or right, rotate you in all direction.

As a matter of fact, the artifact has viewer tortured on purpose, in order to balance the power dynamic between the fast and slow, to put fast human beings into slow stoneman’s shoes, to let them feel related. The artifact should lead people to revisit the ethic of killing, to question the morality of incinerating stonemen.

The ones who walk away from Omelas

The novel depicts the summer festival in Omelas, whose happiness and comfort lie solely on the endless misery of the boy. The artifact that I come up with is a dark room with a window on its side, in which a participant sits, whose physiologial measurements are measured in real-time. There are also other participants on the outside of the window so that they can see each other. However, the room is soundproof, while a mircrophone is placed outside and a headphone is placed inside, meanign that there will be no mutal communcation. Luckily, wires are connected to all participants. A non-fatal but rather painful current runs through them. Here comes the interesting part. The happier the participant inside the room is, the greater current run towards those outside the room; the happier the participants outside the room are, the greater current run towards the one inside the room. In a more tangible term, their happiness and comfort should be negatively-correlated. Despite no direct communication, interaction is fulfilled through the wires. Participants should swap their position at an interval of time.
This artifact again focuses on resolving the imbalanced power dynamic between the boy and the citizens. Through experiencing the artifact, they should be more aware of the misery. Maybe free the boy eventually at some stages.