Addiction

原创 OnExhibit 该账号已冻结

Introduction:

Life is not always easy. For escape, people may immerse themselves in things like nicotine,alcohol, digital world and love. Gradually, for some people, they will even get addicted to them. Different people have different views about their addiction, and sometimes they may get overwhelmed in how to deal with it. Moreover, we are now living in the age of “information explosion”, and the daily volume of information is so great that people easily get lost. When it comes toaddiction, we will come up with a lot of videos or articles persuading us to give up the addiction. We passively accepted such information, but we almost never carefully think about the reason why we need to quit something. Whether it is the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain, addiction is theprocess of making an unbearable reality temporarily bearable by substance orbehavior. There is a famous old saying in Chinese “物极必反”, which means things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. And this rings true in people’s attitudes toward their hobbies. When someone isextremely obsessed with something, he or she will be dominated by theirincontinent emotions and desire. Gradually people with addictions would be unable to control their behaviors and minds while the free will is losing. In order to raise awareness globally, it is inevitable to resist addiction, which provokes inefficiency and hindering social contact. In the long run, people’s spiritual world will be eroded or poor, and there will be incalculable losses to human innovation and social development.

Our Goal:

Through the exhibition we host, we want people to immersethemselves in the “emotion” of addiction. Beyond didactic theory, we emphasizethe direct feeling, visual and mental impact of the viewers, when they watchour artworks. After that, viewers themselves can judge it.

Abstinence Reactions of Smoking

Zhuoran Ma

(Duke Kunshan University 2022)

Background: It is widely recognized that smokers usually have higher risk of suffering from severe health problems. However, still, some adolescents are attracted to smoking out of curiosity or the desire to be cool. And they usually believe that it won’t be hard for them to stop before they get addicted to smoking. But the truth is, smokers will develop high reliance on nicotine and will have strong abstinence reactions when they try not to smoke, making it tough for them to quit.

As we all know, there are many artworks like posters, telling people not to smoke. So what makes my work different? You will find the answer in the following video.

Symptom One: Hard to Concentrate

2020 Video 30 sec.

Through this project, she does not really want spectators to see the full text. What she want is to visualize the symptom of hard to concentrate and to let spectators actually feel it themselves. To achieve this, she made an animation of a flying cigarette, indicating flies that usually distract us in daily life, flying all over the screen. This may make spectators to switch their attention to the cigarette instead of the text. Besides, while it is flying, it is also letting out smoke to imitate the smoking process. As smoke gets thicker, spectators need to try hard to distinguish the characters at the back, in other words, trying to re-concentrate on what we are doing. However, failed at the last. She didn’t tell spectators previously that this is actually the first piece because distractions always occur suddenly in real life. So she decides to recreate this by overlapping the text with this surprising animation to make them feel the symptom better.

Symptom Two: Uncontrolled Anger

2020 Gif Video (18sec.) Video (27sec.)

In her daily life, she has found some unexpected issues that make her feel annoyed or angry. For example, when she bought something in the vending machine and the good got stuck when it was about to fall down, or when she tried to download a file and the progress was stuck at 99%. These phenomena have the power to drive people “mad,” which is the inspiration for her to recreate a certain mood like uncontrolled anger. To connect it with smoking, she fused some relevant elements into each animation when she designed them. The first one is cigarette cases, the second is a graphic design of a cigarette and the third is a cigarette-like round shape progress bar. By seeing these Gifs indicating common annoying phenomena in a role, hopefully, spectators can have a feeling of uncontrolled anger and realize what kind of negative emotion smokers will have when they try to quit smoking.

A Few Tips for Relaxation:(Please follow these instructions)

• Find a sofa or bed

• Lie down

• Make yourself comfortable

• Put on your earphone

• Turn up the volume

• Close your eyes

• Enjoy the audio (Please do listen to it for more than 1 min.)

Symptom Three: Sleeplessness

2020 Audio 3 min. 12sec.

Sleeplessness another symptom for abstinence reactions of smoking, which is the feeling that we want to fall asleep, but our mind stays active all the time. To recreate this, before playing the audio, she provides a guide for participants to follow and to make themselves comfortable, getting ready to relax themselves. If they follow every tip properly, they are now in a mood of relaxation, which is similar to what we feel when we try to go to sleep. In the first 30 seconds of the audio, she just plays ambiance outdoor night sound, enhancing the peaceful feeling. She intentionally makes this part long since she wants participants to completely feel relaxed.

Gradually, she adds sounds that smokers will make, like lighting a cigarette, breathing in and out, coughing and spitting, switching from different tracks and from low to higher volume. Through this, she wants to create an image that there are smokers all around the participant and making loud and constant noises. Hopefully, when hearing these unexpected noises, spectators will have a strong feeling of discomfort, which stops them from relaxation. In this way, they will experience the sleeplessness that smokers usually suffer from as one of the abstinence reactions.

Ideas & Creativity

Zhuoran Ma: Usually, artworks that tell people not to smoke have a strong visual impact on spectators, like a picture of the corroded lung. However, it seldom stops people from smoking even with that strong visual impact. She thinks part of the reason is that the bad outcome seems too far away and because we cannot feel it, we fail to relate our behavior to it. Therefore, in her artworks, she recreates those abstinence reactions in a less intense way by making funny but annoying animation and audio to let participants experience a sense of discomfort in real-time. Hopefully, for participants who want to give smoking a try out of curiosity will give up their idea and realize that they will suffer a lot more mentally than they expect, which can actually outweigh the pleasure they will get from smoking.

Phone Addiction

Yulai Yang

(Duke Kunshan University 2022)

Background: Nowadays, phone has become a necessity of people’s life. Phone can include entertainment, trade, communication and even love relationships. In a city, every person will use their phones around 5 hours every day. So, I am thinking there are two perspectives of addiction to phone. The first part is the addiction to information on the phones. Another one is the addiction to phone itself, as people will feel anxious and uneasy when their phone is not in their hands. As a result, I call it phone addiction instead of information addiction.

Part One: Lift up your head;

2020 Physical product

In this part, she wants to put a huge tank with water in the center of the exhibition room. There will be a model of a human. His body is hollowed-out and was submerged by the water. The water is very close to his nose that almost makes him breathless. However, the gesture of the model is that his head is bowing down, looking at his phone. Compared to his hollowed-out body, most of his head is solid. Finally, the ceiling above the tank is decorated with meaty plants and a green vine hanging down.

There are three meanings I want to express through these objects.

•Superficially, the water is close to the man’s nose which means the man is almost drowned by the water. Water is projected by the projector with a lot of information to form into the information sea. It indicates the information on the phone nearly submerges us.

•Even though the water is submerging him, he does not notice but keeps bowing down with attention on his phone. It indicates our strong addiction to phones.

•Finally, since he refuses to lift up his head, he is not able to see the spectacular nature and the rope to help him survive. I am saying that people that forget their real home(nature) will be devoured by technology.

Part Two: Drowning into the information

2020 Interactive product

• When you arrive at a certain place, your face will be captured by the camera and sent to the online “photo collections” where the program will seize the face parts of the photos.

•The nearby projector connects with the Internet and receives the photos.

•Finally, the projector will project the photos of visitors’ faces onto the head of the drowning man.

•Notes: The certain place will tell people they will be taken pictures. If they do not like being taken pictures, they can choose to stand out of the zone.

The purpose of setting the interactive installation is to give people immersive feelings of drowning into the water(information). And it makes people participate more in the artwork so that people will have a deeper impression of phone addiction. The idea of projecting the face to a ball comes from artwork in the “Observation” exhibition.

The design of the monitor:

She decides to make the monitor on the wall to be in the shape of the phone. She want s to convey here is that when people are using phones, phones are also watching people. They are capturing, monitoring and analyzing you. Phones actually is the biggest technology surveillance for people.

Background music: The sound of nature is covered by the sound of technology

Ideas & Creativity

Yulai Yang: She mainly used a series of metaphors to deliver her thoughts about the addiction to phone. If we keep bowing down our heads on our phones, the problems are not only about cervical spondylosis but more and more. We choose to stay at home with phones instead of going out to play. We choose to look at the information on our phones instead of appreciating the glorious flowers in the warm Spring. The interactive installation is to further warn people, we are submerged by the sea of information. The sentence she wants people to shout out in their hearts is that please lift up your head to see the brilliant scenery on the other side.

Shopping Addiction

Melody Cheng

(Duke Kunshan University 2022)

Background: The whirlpool of consumerism is sweeping the globe, eroding the rationality of more and more people. In the shopping malls and online shopping festivals, people are so busy shopping as if they will have a great loss if they don't buy enough things. This long-term state is actually unhealthy——because it makes people fall into a long period of self-blame and regret after a short pleasure.

In this exhibition, dizzy colors, messy scenes, and disturbing sounds take the audience to shopping-related scenes. The product of a chronic shopping addiction is compressed into a specific space to touch the mood and emotions of the audience with the activities they have participated in their lives. It is dedicated to creating the anxious and guilty feeling after the temporary pleasure of irrational shopping, to help the audience rethink the rationality of their usual shopping habits and possible changes.

Project One: Mannequins of Blindness

2020 Physical exhibits

The first work she has is mannequins with their heads covered by colored shopping bags. They won't be put on all kinds of clothes, but just stand there as they originally look like. The mannequins will be put in two rows close together at the entrance of her exhibition area, so visitors need to walk through and see all of them in turn. In general, mannequins are used to display clothing to attract people's attention to purchase. But she undressed mannequins and put shopping bags on their heads, creating a sense of blindness of people when over shopping. Shopping bags with a high saturation of color make people feel dazzled. Also, passing two rows of mannequins that are usually taller than ordinary people may give them a sense of commanding oppression.

Project Two: Shopping Coupons Muppets

2020 Mechanical Installation

The second of her work reflects more on people’s addictiveness of online shopping. She finds that there are more and more online shopping festivals in China. Women's Day, the anniversary of Taobao and Jingdong, Double 11, and Double 12… The biggest promotional method of these shopping festivals is to distribute shopping coupons. For example, if you buy things worth 300 yuan, you can get a 30 yuan discount. But if you buy things worth 500 yuan, many people will buy another 100 yuan to scrape up the money to get a discount. This may not sound like a good deal, but people actually do it because discounts are so attractive. Shopping coupons are easy to get and there is no limit to the number. This caused some people to buy a lot of unnecessary things in order to make up for these full discounts.
For her work, it is a mechanical moveable installation. These muppets can be rotated in one direction, and the strings on their hands can be moved to simulate the feeling of being manipulated. In the four corners of the device, there will be projectors device that can project the image of the shopping coupons on the top of the device and the surrounding underground.

The audience can walk into the middle of this installation. When the projectors open, the audience will see the countless shopping coupons overhead. At the same time, they can feel the dizziness and oppression of these muppets rotating around themselves. For these muppets, some people's words will be shown their faces, which are collected on social media. People post on social media about their feelings about participating in online shopping festivals. Often people complain about buying too much or buying unnecessary things. These words are also recorded and played. So when you walk into these puppets, you can hear the sound of each individual. The audience might find their own stories on these muppets and reflect on their behaviors. They can clearly feel that people are dominated by shopping coupons and controlled by merchants and e-commerce platforms behind it.

Project Three: Tense Moment of Mall Music

2020 Audio 2 min. 23sec.

Her last piece is an audio clip she plans to play as background music in the exhibition area. She uses music that is usually played in shopping malls to make people feel relaxed when the mall is about to close. She adds some sounds of scanning clothing labels, swiping credit cards and the sound of ATMs. She hopes to use these shopping-related elements to create a sense of anxiety about shopping too much, and even have a large debt burden afterward. It finally stimulates the after effect which people end up shopping and find themselves shopping so irrationally. She also deliberately sets up some sudden pause in music to achieve a feeling of sudden tension in relaxation.

If this exhibition can actually happen offline, she might observe the differences and changes in people's behavior when they hear the first half of the music versus the later processed music, such as the time they spend in the exhibition hall. This may lead to interesting conclusions.

Ideas & Creativity

Melody Cheng: The main element of her work is using dummies to replace and represent real people. Usually, the mannequins help showcase clothes and stimulate people's desire to buy. But now they can be used to show a feeling of numb and being manipulated. Although these dummies do not have specific identities or faces, you still can feel you are one of them. She also applies the audiovisual combination in her work. This kind of multi-sensory stimulation can make the audience feel and understand my works from different angles.

Curator: Kiera Zhou

Artists: Zhuoran Ma

Yulai Yang

Melody Cheng