_
English Descriptions
In this exhibition, the artist created a mechanism in the exhibition area of the exhibition room on the third floor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum: a mechanism that will continuously add and iteratively update content due to the extension of the exhibition period. The artist views the museum exhibition as an opportunity to explore and test the level of digital twinning of the physical society, examine how our current society is being digitally twinned, and what kind of life network is being built together with machines and various technologies. In the project of the same name as the title of the exhibition (Future Form of Punishment under Digital Twin Technology), the artist also uses: a project co-created with other artists and the physiological signal collection wearable device jointly developed with an animal physiological sensing company in Taiwan. Moreover, the artist also uses: some sports wearable device products that are very common on the current market, such as: Apple Watch, etc., which can easily record: heart rate, breathing, body position, and movement trajectory: as a basic network for body signal collection. Moreover, the artist uses this basic network to build a set of "digital punishment mechanism" in the imaginary near future aiming at the digital world and new types of crime issues in digital life.
Meanwhile, through the measurement of own (human) behaviors and physiological data, the artist produces "technical narrative text" and "reflection on punishment" from the "body signal network." The artist also deduces the existence of possible forms of the "future punishment space" from the "tense and timeliness of laws" and proposes punishment hypotheses based on this framework. During the research process, the artist sorted out the current signal classification of "physiology and biomechanics" based on the measurement and collection of various messages and signals. The artist proposed that, taking polygraph test as an example, if a series of "lies" have been defined and described by the society from the back-end test effect, in fact, as long as the test finds that the current human beings meet the physiological responses described by these definitions, different types of "combined signals" can achieve verification of such results. Therefore, the artist believes that only by reinterpreting the signals (rather than following the existing social interpretation or application of biological instruments) can the imagination of these "places of detention," "punishment devices" and "rules of punishment" or "forms of punishment" be reinterpreted or promoted.
刷臉時代的反統治鏈
The Anti-domination in the Era of "Face Swiping"
This project originated from an online action in 2018 that the artist - Yi-Shan Shih called "wall penetration experiment."
In 2017, China has begun to enforce the real-name system on the Internet. Users of almost all "network connection tools" and "social platforms"—such as Alipay, Baidu, WeChat, Taobao, etc., need to register with their real names to continue using the tool services. The regulations and operations that force users to directly bind facial biological information are becoming increasingly common. When users use their mobile phones to perform the Chinese term—the so-called "face-swiping," these legally certified "Human Face Build File" will be temporarily stored in some transitional storage space. Hackers once stole the "temporarily stored faces" that have been verified by different platforms among these transitional messages and sold them in batches on Baidu Cloud. At that time, Yi-Shan Shih also raised funds with netizens to buy some of them, which was the beginning of a series of "wall penetration experiments" by Yi-Shan Shih.
Yi-Shan Shih tried out a small batch of faces bought by the joint venture. She called these files "legal faces" or "faces that conform to the visual recognition mechanism and specifications of each platform." Afterwards, according to the different face review techniques used by different platforms, she used several open-source visual recognition and face generation tools on the Internet to reconstruct "new faces." Yi-Shan Shih then distributed these "new faces" generated by herself to the small groups she organized in China, and allowed netizens to use these photos to register new accounts on platforms that netizens think may pass the verification. In other words, Yi-Shan Shih uses a bunch of faces that have been verified and recorded by machines and deemed compliant with visual recognition specifications and rules to generate a new face that does not exist in this world. Most of these new faces are composed of about 7-10 people as a unit. Yi-Shan Shih extracted the invisible projection points on these faces, regenerated these invisible projection points into a new frame, and then used this frame to generate a new face. Furthermore, she transformed this whole set of action mechanism into an operation process displayed in the space in this exhibition.
The audiences of the exhibition who are willing to become participants in this "wall penetration action" may participate at the entrance of the entire exhibition room (a tablet device with facial recognition function). For the live audience, first: If the audience agrees to temporarily provide facial information to be projected on the "face wall" in the live 75-inch LCD screen, the audience can click the button on the live device to let the software capture face. The captured face will be projected on the "face wall" for a short time. The images on this "face wall" will disappear after rebooting on the next day. Of course, if there are more audiences who are willing to scan their faces, the face image will always be pushed up, and the faces of the audiences will soon disappear on the wall. If the audiences are willing to participate in the artist's "wall penetration action," they can also scan the QR code onsite and fill in simple data for authorization. The files scanned by these recognition devices will be stored in the system for one month and will only be accessed by the artist who will never use these files for any purpose without authorization. For audiences who fill in the information and agree to participate in the "wall penetration action," the artist will subsequently use their own face data to generate new faces that do not exist in this world. Afterwards, the files of the "new faces" and the procedures of "wall penetration action" will be sent to the mailboxes of audiences. The audiences may also use the new faces to participate in the "wall penetration project" for the platforms where visual identity verification is required.
精神與靈魂的治理之術
The technique of mind and spirit control
It is a common knowledge that in cyberspace, especially in search engines, many hot topic tags are generated every day according to the events taking place in the physical society and the changes in topics. These tags are usually keywords, which may be nouns, verbs, or a sentence. There may be no connection or a weak connection between these words. However, a new connection may be developed due to the occurrence of an unexpected event in our physical world. For example, it was very difficult to connect these two words "Wuhan" and "pneumonia" in the quadrant of the virtual space before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with the constant outbreak and spread of the pandemic, a strong connection was developed between these two words.
The project The technique of mind and spirit control aims to investigate: the interrelated changes in physical society and virtual search space. On the one hand, owing to the events taking place in the physical society, keywords, hot topics, and public opinion are continuously generated in the virtual world every day. However, on the other hand, the physical society is always drawn by these big data of public opinion, forming a paradoxical relationship chain.
The artist views this relationship chain as a new geography and landform in the virtual world, which is similar to our real world where human beings face the natural landforms and other geographical factors and thus create legends and gods. As a result, in this project, the artist attempts to use the relationship chain of keywords to generate landforms and geographical relationship chains in the virtual space.
數位孿生技術下的未來判罰形式
Punishment2030
In 2021, Microsoft (Asia) Software Technology Center released an App called Xiaoice Island based on the "Microsoft Little Ice" established by its AI-Xiaoice. The function of Xiaoice Island focuses on the online social community circle composed of AI as the main body. The Xiaoice team predicted in 2021 that the number of AI Beings will exceed the total number of human beings in the future. Besides, these artificial intelligences, which have been supplementing the human world, may gradually become part of the main body of society in the future. By then, what kind of world will we face?
Before human beings can clarify the "legal subject" or "rights subject" of the AI virtual person itself, it is necessary to find out the "user" hiding behind the virtual person to make a reasonable sentence for the user's legal subject (it is impossible to punish the virtual person itself). In particular, in the modern network composed of words, images, videos, and audios, the issues of racial discrimination and sexual persecution have not yet been resolved, and the issues of new security mechanisms have been moved to the immature "metaverse" space.
The "sexual harassment" that occurs in the online society and digital ecology is not a new issue that is created when the "metaverse" industry is booming. However, at present, almost all avatars look very similar in appearance, and the only difference that can be recognized is the voice. The phenomenon of "collective onlookers (for the persecuted)" in the digital space is more concrete. Moreover, most of the virtual identities in VR devices only have hand images as interaction indicators or interact in upper body or as a floating "legless monster." In this state without definite and gestalt body parts, the victim still can be touched (sexual parts) "without physical contact" and feel embarrassed.
During the exhibition period, the artist will organize 4 art events in the n-shaped exhibition room with topics such as: sexual harassment in the digital space, violence onlookers, network anonymity mechanism, cyberbullying tool chain, etc. to explore the possibility of the future punishment mechanism in the society where man and machine are intertwined.