Poem Generator

I always want to cook for myself every day meal, but I find it very time-consuming, especially for a Libra, to decide what to cook. So this week, I created a Cooking Poem Generator that can generate Chinese style recipe in a poetic form.

Based on A House of Dust, the generator deploy a standard structure with different input field, such as ingredients, preparation method, sauces, carbs, etc. Different from A House of Dust, whose sentences can be in different order, the recipe has to follow certain sequence.

I really want to incorporate different cooking styles, so to generate more unexpected dishes. However, each style has different sequences and, thus, make it hard to make sense if not considering this factor.

I read different recipe and finalize a standard sequence (just like making salad!) that can be applied to different ingredients. Then I write one recipe with words that can be replaced highlighted. Then I used the A House of Dust’s method to create arrays of word groups and construct the whole “poem”.

Screen Shot 2019-02-14 at 12.45.09 AM

Code lives here.

Cooking Poem

Mince garlic.
Set aside.

Dice carrot, potato and broccoli.
Set aside.

In a small bowl, 
pour the vinegar, 
sesame oil and sherry wine.
Stir it.

Place chick thigh in the bowl. 
Season with salt and black pepper
Marinade it, for 30 minutes.

Drizzle 1 teaspoon oil into a skillet with high heat.
Stir in garlic and cook until tempting fragrant,
about 1 minute.

Add chick thigh. Stir-fry until it is golden-ish.
Reduce to medium heat and add carrot, potato and broccoli.
Add Szechuan pepper.

Stir-fry until everything is cooked through.
Garnish with sesame seeds.
Servie over naan.
Eat it.

Out of curiosity, I also tried to make a Chinese poem generator. I used the poem 琵琶行 by Juyi Bai, broke the whole poem into an array of characters, and reconstructed the characters into a new poem with the same structure.

Code lives here.

Screen Shot 2019-02-14 at 2.34.24 PM.png

Worlding Narratives

This week, my teammates and I went to tandon and collected samples from several locations: canteen, bathroom, pantry, and elevator. We put the samples under the microscope and selected three sites we loved the most. Then, based on the images of each site, I created a worlding narrative for each of them.

Site 1: Microwave

Title: Discontinuous reality and continuous dream in Oumi

Citizens in Oumi have to live in their dreams. The uncertainty, instability and hostility in the reality make it extremely hard for them to survive and civilization to thrive. Electromagnetic radiation will crash through their homeland at any unexpected moment, and the intolerable heat will come along to erode their desires and memories. In such reality, even the luckiest ones can only survive 4208 kasuks (aka 16 hours) at most. In such reality, their lives are transient, and their collective memories are discontinuous.

So Oumi inhabitant have to live in dreams, where memories can be recreated, reconstructed and relived, desires can find outlets to grow, and consciousness can be continuous. In this way, they can make sure they consume the least and still live a colorful life that the reality could not promise.

The resources of dreams come from every short-lived individuals’ real lives, which are open-sourced and bound to be used by anyone in this community. The form of individual Oumier is hard to define. They are connected with each other, forming into a united organism with shared memory resources floating within it. So you will notice that the unity’s shape is constantly changing. Sometimes you might find certain Oumi inhabitants leave the group, but won’t for long. Because in such inclement condition, Oumi can only survive with the support of each other.

Oumi residents are so used to such way of living that when one day, when the environment is being kind to them, they will not wake up. They will only believe in their connected unity, collected memories, and endless dreams.

Site 2: Toilet

Title: Gangi Town

The society of Gangi Town is comprised of thousands of millions of families. Each family is the smallest unit in which each individual is able to survive. Because living in an environment with large fluidity, inhabitants believe that they have to be tied with some others to stay relatively stable, which make foraging and growing easier. If one leaves the family, as most of them stated, it will be carried away by the torrent to an infertile hell. Only through forming a family with others can one take a rest from fighting against the flush.

Some of the brave ancestors have tried to live alone and go with the flow, but none of them came back, except one who was crazy enough to lobby everyone leave their families and take risk to be free. However, most of the inhabitants in this society do not believe in risk, they are driven by the eager of connecting with others. Whenever they are connected to another individual, their control centralis will release a kind of chemical that make them feel satisfied and happy. While to maintain the connection, each one has to give out a certain amount of energy from time to time in order to activate the “bridge” between them. However, if there are too many connections, the inhabitant will run out of energy and burn out.

Site 3: Soldering station

Title: Looe — the most familiar stranger

Living in an environment full of toxic gas and sparks of electricity, Looe is a mutualistic system where Lo and Oe are reliant on each other. Lo is a string-like creature with a sturdy shell, on top of which grows millions of micro fluff whose antenna could capture electricity in the environment and turn it into energy. Oe is much smaller. It is semi-transparent circular creature with a huge lung that occupies almost half of its body. Covered by a net of sponge-like tissue, Oe can absorb a certain kind of gas and give out oxygen.

In this system, Lo and Oe always live together so that Lo can protect Oe from electricity, while Oe can help Lo purifies the air. They don’t need to exchange information to achieve this, they just do what is best for them. Since the ancient time, those Oe who live next to Lo have better chance to survive and grow. And vice versa. Therefore, as time goes by, Lo and Oe can never separate. Even though they are totally different creatures, there are marks in their genes about their partners, and their bodies changed for better fit for their partners. And once the cooperated organism is formed, they will seldom leave the group. After the reproduction of several generations, the unity will become too large and will have to separate into a few smaller groups.

Lo and Oe would not try to fall in love or mate with each other, albeit living an intimate life together. Because, once they did, their offspring, who is neither Lo nor Oe, would not survive under such environment.

Exhibition visit: Judson Dance Theatre – The Work is Never Done

Theme: Judson Dance Theatre – The Work is Never Done

Date visit: Feb 1, 2019

Venue: MoMA

Disobedient Electronic: The Last Moment Being Human

Title: The Last Moment Being Human

Object: A watch that can share with you the last moment of someone being executed

Team: Nick Tanic, Wenjing Liu

Duration: 1 week

Concept

Disobedient, originated from civil disobedience, means fight, in any ways, against superior authorities, such as government, big corporation, mainstreams, dogma, etc. Disobedient Electronic, therefore, is an object that triggers discussion on controversial topics using electronics.

We started this week’s assignment by thinking about topics that we are interested in talking about. We landed on the questioning of capital punishment, through which an authority deprives the right of one being an human, based on its own judgement, through irreversible and coercive method.

Till today, among 195 UN countries, there are still 55 of them retain capital punishment. Some of these countries are regarded high score in Human Right Index, such as United State, Japan, Singapore. While China remains to be the country that executed the most capital punishment, followed by Iran and Saudi Arabia. According to Amnesty Internationals, there were at least 998 executions in 23 countries in 2017, down by 29% from 2015 (1634 executions). And at least 21,919 people were known to be on death roll by the end of 2017.

Screen Shot 2019-02-10 at 7.47.13 AM.png — Source: Wikipedia

Through this project, we hope to arouse a discussion on this government-sanctioned practice whereby a person is deprived of right of being alive as a punishment for his/her crime judged by authority. Should an authority have such power to terminate one’s life? What is justice? How should a society address outliers that would do harm to individuals?

We came up with an idea of creating a electric strap that would vibrate when one human is being executed capital punishment and show his/her last words and name. The vibration is a symbol of being electric shocked. While showing the last words is meant to emphasize the fact that the criminal is a human.

Materials

MKR 1000
LCD screen
Potentialmeter 50k
Vibration motor

The process

We couldn’t find real-time data online. So we used the data of Texas death row executions between 1982 and 2017 from Kaggle. Because of this, we had to change the user flow. Instead of being informed while an individual has been executed, the user will be informed when there were individual(s) executed in the same day of that day. Screen Shot 2562-02-10 at 20.25.00.png

The data is an csv file and we used P5 as a platform to deal with the logic: what information should be shown at this moment. Then transfer the information through serial communication to Arduino and then display on the LCD screen.

P5 code lives here.

Arduino code lives here.

Testing

Problems

For this project, we still have many technical problems:

How to transfer data from Excel to device via wifi
How display different messages on the LCD screen
How to send multiple messages from p5 to Arduino via Serial Communication

References

Amnesty International. “The Death Penalty in 2017: Facts and Figures.” 12 April 2018.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-international-perspective

Critical Object: How to become invisible?

Title: How to become invisible?

Object: A decorative mask that can make you unrecognizable when facing Facial Recognition camera

Team: Wenjing Liu

Jacky Cheung is a Chinese singer and actor who is very famous among Chinese people, especially those from 70-80s. Other than singing well, Jacky is famous for “helping” police find criminals at large. Till now, 55 criminals were caught after Jacky Cheung’s concerts, thanks to Facial Recognition technology. Yeah, this technology is becoming part of people’s lives inevitably. In China, the government plans to employ Facial Recognition technology to CCTVs in public, in order to “recognize criminals and protect citizen”. In the future, people will not only being “naked” on the Internet, we are also “naked” in our physical world.

In questioning this practice of turning everyone in physical world, I set out to design a decorative mask that can help people become “invisible”.

The prototype is under making progress.

RWET 01: Understand transcription

Readings for this week

Bucholtz, Mary. “The Politics of Transcription.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 32, no. 10, 2000, pp. 1439–1465.
Zawacki, Alexander J. “How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples.” Atlas Obscura, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shadows-from-the-walls-of-death-book.
Searle, Steven. A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe, and East Asia. 6 Aug. 2004, http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html

Questions / Thoughts

Information lives in not only words, but also intonation, utterance, facial expression, gestures and context. However, when these information are recorded and compressed into the form of text, how to keep a high fidelity of the information? How to convey those non-text based information into text?

Try my own transcription

Source: An interview with Patti Smith (Stockholm October 1976)

Length: 5:36 mins

Transcription

Question:

What does freedom mean to you?

Patti:

Freedom is inside of me. It means that I’m not hung up with like anybody’s idea of how I should be. You know, I’m out side (I’m outside) of society. I’m an artist. Rock and roll is my art. I’m the nigger of the universe and I’m free because I can leap up and scream. I can put my fist up in the air. I don’t give a shit, you know. I’m not afraid of death, you know. It’s like, you know. Yeah, I’m not afraid of anything except for (uhh) fear itself. I mean, that to me is the greatest thing to fear. It’s the fear itself collapse of the imagination. Otherwise, I feel pretty good.

My father was sort of a beatnik, and he believed in, the one thing my father believed more than anything else was the development of the country of the mind. He believed that the mind was a country and he had to develop it. You have to build and build and build and build the mind. That was his whole philosophy — is the development of the mind. My mother believed in the development of the heart. And I believed in the development of the hand. So we between the three of us: head, heart, hand. HHH, that’s good. Ivan.

Ivan:

Hi Patti.

Patti:

Radio Ethiopia

Question:

What does that mean?

Patti:

Radio Ethiopia is our new record, and it represents to us a naked field where in anyone can express themselves. It’s a free radio, you know, where the DJs, the people with the DJs.. When we perform Radio Ethiopia, I play guitar. I don’t know how to play guitar, but I just getting a perfect rhythm and I play, I don’t care. And the people are allowed to do as they wish. If it’s a really good show, there’s like a thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand people, fifty thousand minds, fifty thousand subconsciousness that I can dip into. I mean, the more people submit, and the more I submit, the greater show it’s going(gonna?) to be, the greater we’re going (gonna?) to be. I mean, I don’t like audiences that sit there and act cool like this. Because nothing is going to happen.

Question:

I think about liberation stuff, liberation of yourself that stuff. It’s like a huge liberation game, a lot of people are walking around saying how free they are, you know, saying all these dangerous sexy words to demonstrate..

Patti:

Yeah, but if you talk about anything too much, you know, if you spend too much time defining what you do, or telling people that you’re free or being defensive about your freedom obviously you’re not free, right. You know, it’s like anytime you have to push things down people’s throat. I mean, I don’t, I don’t try to seduce, I do what I do. Ten people come, ten million come, great. What I do, I believe in, you know. It’s like liberation and all those a lot of movements. Whether it was like beatniks, hippies, women’s lib, they’re all just new political structures, they’re all new dogma. They’re just to me as soon as.. We want to initiate change. But as soon as you get it, you structure your change as soon as you start writing pattern, as soon as you write some political order, write dogma. You’re right there with Catholicism. You’re right there with communism. Anything, anytime (when) you start stating, this this and this, rules and regulations, you’re no longer liberated, you’re just like a new political game, whether it’s religious, you know, spiritual whatever, social.

Question:

It’s all like the door saw break on through the other side.

Patti:

Yeah, and then after you break on through the other side, then you break on through the other side, and the other side, and the other side. And our point is that you can, you spend your whole life keep breaking on through. You can’t just break on through once and think, well, I’ve made it, I broke through. There’s a million membranes to break through. There’s a million places to go, you know, you move to another direction, another dimension — big deal. We went to the moon — big deal. We went to Mars — big deal. We keep moving and moving, and moving, and moving, you know. Mohammad went through seven heavens, big deal. I want to see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousand heaven. You know, it’s like, going through the other side, it’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million door aren’t enough. You have to go beyond, beyond one reflexion, beyond the mirror, beyond beyond.

Reflection

Exhibition Visit: Duo Color — Wang Guangle (TBC)

Artist: Wang Guangle (王光樂)

Theme: Duo Color

Location: Pace Gallery

Date Visited: Jan 30, 2019

Wang Guangle is a contemporary abstract painter from China. He received a BFA in Oil Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. His work has been exhibited internationally at prominent institutions.

Guangle was born in a small village in Fujian, China, in 1976, the year when Mao Zedong passed away. During that time onward, China was witnessed a series of sweeping political, economic and cultural changes — the end of notorious Cultural Revolution, post Sino-Vietnam War, the power struggle among Gang of Four and others, the economic reform and Opening-Up policy by Deng Xiaoping, the Tiananmen Square protest… Chinese people in 1980s unprecedentedly felt a sense of hope for the future. At that age, benefited from the Opening-Up policy, Chinese people started to enjoy books, music, movies freely from the Western country, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As result, people, especially the young generation, started to actively participated in arts and liberal activities.

People buying books from Xinhua Bookstore. (photo from Hualang.net)

Constantly inspired by the sensation of the passage of time, Wang expresses his interest in light in his paintings. He previously focused on sole color in the painting, the works in this exhibition, however, is his first series using two contrast colors.

One interesting thing I found about these paintings are — while you walking pass by one painting, you will feel the perspective of this “hole” following you.

Why he painted like this — his artistic statement

His process

How