Production Credits
Creator : Tong Wu
Visual and Interaction Designer : Tong Wu
Animation and Augmented Reality Developer : Tong Wu
Showcased at:
solo exhibition "Daily Dividuals", LATITUDE Gallery, New York
Interactive Telecommunications Program Thesis Presentation, New York
Work Type :
Augmented Reality, Digital Sculpture
Designer tools :
Static Rendering - KeyShot
Visual Materials Retouching - Adobe Premiere Pro & Photoshop
Developer Tools :
3D model process - Cinema 4D
Animation and AR Development - Unity & AR Foundation
Deploy Tool - Xcode
How would an all-knowing, all-seeing machine process the concept of "human”？
Overview:
Daily Dividuals (2019) is a series of avatar-based, Augmented Reality body sculptures. "How does machine understand and process the concept of human?" To explore this critical question, the artist situated the sculptures in surreal scenes from everyday life in an imaginary future, in which the roles of humans and machines are purposely reversed. Audience could explore these sculptures by either watching the documentation films, or looking at the target objects through an AR app on mobile devices. Daily Dividuals(2019) is created individually by Tong Wu as the thesis project of her master's program in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
Combining social commentary and satire, this project wants to discuss the alienation of and between individuals and their surrounding environments due to increasing complexity and capability of technology in the age of algorithm.
In this project, Tong presents her miniatures as human-object hybrid creatures from an imaginary perspective of machine. By transforming herself into objects such as USB drive, fan and book binder, the artist is visualizing a philosophical exploration about the confusing yet dynamic human-machine relationship, given the context when the uses of artificial intelligence, machine learning have re-shaped the ways common people perceive machine and perceive ourselves.
“Daily Dividuals (AR)” exhibited in “Daily Dividuals 再分体日常”, the solo exhibition of Tong Wu in LATITUDE Gallery, New York, in April 2021.
“Daily Dividuals (AR)” was presented by Tong Wu in New York University ITP Thesis Presentation in May 2019.
Academic / Background Research
The term “dividuals” in the project title “Daily Dividuals” was inspired by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his 1992 work, Postscript on the societies of Control, Deleuze coined the term “dividual” to explain the mechanism of “control society”: the word “individual” can no longer represent the smallest unit that the society could be reduced to. The evolving modern technology of control has turned individuals into “masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” (5, 1992). This shift from individual to dividual means we are in a constant orbit of networks that we are unable to opt out of.
Related Readings:
• China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans (vice)
• Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions (New York Times)
Inspiring Artworks:
• Can you tear for me? by XinLiu
• Primitives by Alan Warbuton
The idea of “dividuals” has been reinforced along with the deepen of social division of labor and media fragmentation. When I was doing background research for this project, a few reports about data labeling industry in China have caught my eyes. Many may think the intelligence of machine comes from its own learning ability, but very few would realize that, AI models need to digest tons of labeled videos, tagged pictures or texts to understand something as simple as “what cats and black cats are both cats.” It’s millions of human data labeler that are spending days sitting in front of computers, repetitively completing mind-numbing labeling tasks ordered by AI tech labs. To some extend, just like workers working on assembly lines, data labelers are operating as the disposable components that power the booming of AI industry.
Design Developing
To reflect on the core concept, bodily alienation in the digital age, I performed a complete objectification of myself, turning my body to into a hyper-flexible avatar model, and used the model to construct imaginary body sculptures.
1. 3D avatar creating and post-processing
platform: structure sensor, wrap3, Photoshop, Maya
I used hand-held structure sensor to scan myself standing still in T-pose and obtained a rough point cloud and an unprocessed skin texture. Then I used softwares including Photoshop, Wrap3 and Maya to process the original point cloud into a 3d model of me.
2. Design Research
“What makes and object an object? and why we are feeling more objectified in the digital world?”
These are the core design questions I’ve been thinking about when constructing the visuals and interaction of the body sculptures. So I conducted several researches, both online and in life, to gain inspiration about visual and interaction designs for this project.
3. Visual Design | Platform: Maya, KeyShot
We always thought we are making machine more like us, but it may be that we are becoming more like machines. In a sense, we are meeting machine in the middle.