This "Tactile Vision" project is one of the three projects under the topic: "TransVision: Exploring the State of the Visual Field in the Age of Extreme Augmentation" for my Master thesis in Harvard Graduate School of Design, completed in May 2018. It is awarded the Project Prize for Best Thesis, and will be Featured in Platform 11.
For more information, please visit: https://www.jiabaoli.org/transvision/
Abstract
Human perception has long been influenced by technological breakthroughs. An intimate mediation of technology lies in between our direct perceptions and the environment we perceive. Through three extreme ideal types of perceptual machines, this project defamiliarizes and questions the habitual ways in which we interpret, operate, and understand the visual world intervened by digital media.
The three machines create:
Hyper-sensitive vision – a speculation on social media’s amplification effect and our filtered communication landscape.
Hyper-focused vision – an analogue version of the searching behavior on the Internet.
Hyper-commoditized vision – monetized vision that meditates on the omnipresent advertisement targeted all over our visual field.
The site of intervention is the visual field in a technologically augmented society. All the three machines have both internal state and external signal. This duality allows them to be seen from outside and experienced from inside.
Commoditized Vision
Hyper-allergenic Vision Syndrome
The modern society has observed an increase in allergies and intolerances. Hypersensitivities are emerging not only medically but also mentally. Technology has this mutual reinforcement effect that people tend to become less tolerant because they interact even less with people who have different backgrounds and opinions just because of the structure of the Internet’s ability to connect selectively and to filter information. Digital media as mediator reinforce people’s tendency of overreacting through viral spread of information and amplification of opinions, making us hypersensitive to our social-political environment. Similar to patterns of intolerance to signals that we see with our immune system, we also see with our mental responses to our environment, to mental stimulation, and to the distribution of the sensible. Under the current social-political media condition, we device more and more structures in order to aggressively filter this environment both in terms of digital media and in terms of physical interactions like what we eat. By creating an artificial allergy to redness, this machine manifests the nonsensical hypersensitivity devised by digital media.
