Art Work:
- Send pictures of instructions to people around me through AirDrop in order to let them drop their phones.
- Selected locations
- International Village Dining Hall
- Classroom
Artist Statement:
The ideation of this project came from social circumstances around people these years. We might notice that over the years people have become more prone to hunchbacks, and that is mainly because of the existence of smartphones. People are always downing their heads and playing with their phones almost all the time, and that is a really bad circumstance. That is not only bad for people’s health and also would let them miss the environment around them. Therefore, I was considering doing something to let them drop their phones.
I was inspired by Men in Grey (Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev, 2009-2014). The feeling of that intervention would give the participants a strong sense of being monitored. The reason is their screens are going to be shown on the case which would let them feel unsafety and drop their phones or close their laptops unconsciously. I want that feeling to appear in my participants, therefore I select AirDrop as my examination tool.
AirDrop is a powerful tool for this project but still has some limitations. I could use AirDrop to send pictures of instructions to strangers without having their contact but the limitation is I could only send pictures to Apple users. Also, I did some variations of my project because I can’t clearly get people’s reactions and feedback if I do not know who I am going to send pictures to. Therefore, I chose to send pictures to my friends without telling them anything about the project and it works perfectly. They were feeling really weird and stunned, one of them even showed the picture to me and ask do I also received that picture, and soon they dropped their phones. The location of the project could also be diverse, I chose IV Dining Hall and one of my classes for this project. I made different pictures of instructions for different locations in order to enhance the feeling of being monitored. Overall, the intervention works perfectly, and the participants’ reactions really achieved my original purpose.