Zhiping (Sylvia) Xiao Form of Your Thoughts

What role might physical mind-mapping take in reconciling different viewpoints in order to reduce miscommunication?

Have you ever had the feeling of “how could he/she/they say that?” “How in the world could that person do that?” “How inhuman that person is!”

Yeah, why?

I am going to throw research on that.

The rough answer I’ve come up with so far is that people are similar to AI – trained by different databases. The databases of others stay unknown to us, which creates space for us to misinterpret others, leading to ‘errors’.

So, I wonder, could we unveil each one of our ‘databases’? How could we plot the contexts together so we can see each other and ourselves better in perspective?

What do your thoughts look like?

What’s in your mind? Fold and write down what’s in your mind.

And think: How are your thoughts related? What’s the context of each one of your thoughts? Pick one surface that you wrote context on; is there another surface whose stories caused the first thought? Is there any surface that can explain why you say this?

Does this format feel natural to you? What format would you feel more natural to you? What’s the shape of your thoughts?

If you can find another finished folding, try to place the two pieces in relation to each other. Are there any related thoughts?

You may add notes about your thoughts by attaching new material to the surfaces.

The form of my thought is three-dimensional. I found that writing on paper doesn’t feel natural to my way of thinking so I started to write on a box by my side and found that comfortable for me. Then I brought different shapes of boxes for my peers to choose and asked them to write what’s been on their mind recently on the box they pick.

While writing, my peers brought attention to how dynamic and flexibility of different surfaces affect reading sequence. For instance, the quality of privacy differences between insides and outside of the object (figure 1), how ‘breaking into’ the material enables carries a different type of energy for noting (figure 2), and opportunities of using notes as wearables and other display opportunities (figure 3).

After all the experiments with my peers, I also want to explore how my thoughts could connect with the form of the objects by myself.

Egg carriage has interesting typography (figure 6, 7). I can write in different orientations, across surfaces with the string of thoughts, and it makes the writing more interesting. It has a natural highlighting point which could also be used as a way to group thoughts. It also opens up a unique way to display notes.

Plastic bottle (figure 9) is transparent with complex surface transitions. It is like natural grids for me to write on. I can’t write on the inner side but it still creates interesting overlaying effects. Because there are so many orientation opportunities on a shape like a bottle, I could easily highlight things by changing the orientation (and with colour differences).

The sushi box (figure 10) has a bigger proportion of flat surface with natural grid on it for me to write something that’s visually formatted. I used it as a reminder. It’s also good for writing additional informations. The surface turnings create natural visual hierarchies. And I don’t feel anxious about approaching the margin when writing because each side can be continuous onto another side.

The earlier experiments mainly focused on how to plot each one of our thoughts onto different forms of surfaces, but how can different forms of thoughts speak to each other?

In my mind opinions come like arrows. They shoot toward the core of the topic from different directions and backgrounds. I first tried plotting out the discourse about my undergrad school (figure 13). Then I tried to plot out the different considerations of my current research question (figure 14). This model provides opportunites to reconcile different viewpoints. I am planning to explore more forms, spirals for example, as my next step to stitch together the form of your thoughts.

What unique information or emotions can be evoked by kinetic typography?

How can a symbol be designed to portray or envision London in the future using kinetic typography in immersive environments?

The immersive environment is a situation where the viewer is actually in the middle of an artificial world observing what is happening. The viewer uses all their senses to experience this virtual world. Immersive kinetic typography will be based on the visual representation of the text, combined with the technology and the wrap-around environment to create artworks that allow the viewer to interact emotionally and psychologically with the design and the surroundings. It is predominantly communicative, in comparison with media art which has the function of explicitly expressing art, humanities, and science.

From the 21st century, because of the development of the internet and various new media software, immersive interactive kinetic typography, as a new form of visual design expression, is finding the intersection of people’s communication and digital experience in a new environment. It is forming a new immersive and unique system of dynamic linguistic communication that refreshes the perception of communication. It creates a bridge that connects designers and audiences in a combination of different media and spaces. The viewer can become part of the artwork through their experience of the artistic process and can enhance the design concept and express profound connotations.

In order to broaden our understanding of this new language system and its impact, this project presents a study in which the author will create interactive kinetic typography in immersive environments, demonstrating that this can be used to continuously convey the dynamic effects of information. I intend to create a research project that expresses a view of the characteristics of a future London environment, as well as a kinetic typography archive that expresses different messages about feelings.

I collected sound and video clips in London, and I found that the seven participants, my classmates, were largely consistent in their perceptive evaluation of the examples I provided. This ongoing project will analyse the audience’s desire for self-expression and emotional communication in kinetic typography by collecting their feedback on the work. It uses a combination of the meaning of the typeface itself and the expressive nature of typographic movement, and places it in a virtual immersive space. These different elements come together to form a unique project. The viewer can not only see with their eyes but can even feel the work with their senses and body, communicating with it in a way that can enhance the emotional quality of the viewer. The findings of this research provide design guidelines for the use of immersive environments to demonstrate the communication of information in kinetic typography.

This project was the starting point for my research on the direction of immersive kinetic typography. Last year, I explored the rhythmic movement of text in digital space using Chinese verbs as visual elements, and the project builds on how text can come alive with exaggerated movement as it changes shape and number. When my work was exhibited, the most frequently asked question was “Can your project interact with the audience?”. I realised that this topic can be carried on in further research studies.

How can we become the body without organs in the anthropocene epoch? How do external sounds affect us?

Speculative design is a growing methodology raised by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby that objects to orthodox forecasting approaches, thus creating open debate about what kind of future people want. Speculative design could be a thought experiment and method to provide viable solutions and stimulate audiences to realise and discuss the ‘wicked problems’ – problems that are challenging or unattainable to solve (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Many speculative artworks deal with various techno-futures that reshape how people interact with resources and the environment – a task we may need to reset our imaginations in reaction to the Anthropocene, the latest historical era when human activities have significantly impacted the planet's environment and ecosystems. This phrase refers to an unofficial geologic time unit (National Geographic Society, 2022).

The research started with these keywords: speculative design, future, and interview and further expanded to the body without organs and applied sounds to investigate the complex interplay between Anthropocene and the future and the human body.

This practice-based research employs a standardised and open-ended interview method to participate in discussions about futures, bodies, and identities as the first step. Second, thematic analysis was utilised to gather data, analyse, and evaluate the results of the interviews. Thematic analysis is a helpful tool for resolving experiences, perspectives, or behaviours during data collection. The interview results led the investigation to a philosophical concept – the body without organs and Anthropocene. Raised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the body without organs means the body is uncontrolled and floating, opposing the dominant subject, and refusing to construct a central meaning. Sounds, especially experimental sounds, could be regarded as the body without organs since they are decentralised and fluid.

This research aims to provoke people to be aware of three major concerns in an artistic approach: what type of future people want, what the future might be, and how to react to it.

We as humans should examine ourselves under the context of the Anthropocene. We may need to rethink the consequences of our political and social structures on the earth (Anderson, 2015).

‘The Earth – the Deterritorialize, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters flow in all directions, free intensities or nomadic mad or transitory particles’ (Fast, 2018).

Deleuze and Guattari describe the earth as a body without organs, that the body is uncontrolled and floating, opposes the dominant subject, and refuses to construct a central meaning. At the same time, a body without organs is not a specific ‘body’; it can be anything that fulfils this requirement, such as a book that lacks a conventional narrative.

It is a response and backwash for the daily body under the current cultural system. Based upon this, the experimental sound can also be regarded as a body without organs since it has the following characteristics: a) Sounds have the characteristic of vibration. Sound is a vibrating power that creates linkages between human and nonhuman bodies (Fast, 2018). b) The hearer is fluid to the same degree as the sound object is fluid. The listener’s hearing, perspective, psychology, and culture shape the sound. Each person, community, and culture listen differently (Shank, 2020).

In some ways, we are as unpredictable and fluid as the body without organs. We as humans are endeavouring to figure out the position in nature, the relationship with technique, and the images of the other. However, in the physical world, we are restrained by the authority, power system and ‘the truth’, which means we are fettered. Likewise, capitalism and colonialism are closely correlated to the Anthropocene's consequences.

To break the centralisation system, we need to build a new ideology. Referring to the concept of ‘rhizomes’, raised by Deleuze, which means we need to create a diversified, mutability, irregularity, and fluid. When we believe we have touched freedom and unfettered metamorphosis, how can external voices affect us, whether we notice or not? Can we calmly confronted when the Anthropocene comes and be a body without organs in a world supervised by systems and authority?

Ultimately, the artwork is an applied interview with the future body applied generative arts as a tool to explore the relationship between anthropocene, sounds and body (see below). A hybrid of a tree and a human backbone. The tree represents rhizomes – the metaphor and symbolism of the body without organs. The spine means human, both physically and spiritually. It moves, dances, and transforms vigorously or gently, affected by the random sounds of this world. This object seems to convert freely and uncontrollably, but it is controlled by the system, which is the code I put in. It moves based on the rhythm, pitch of the voice.

How does indeterminacy restructure our mechanisms of seeing the world, and how does randomness disempower the paradigms and ideologies that are imposed on us through visual lenses?

Communication is a set of tools that creates intermediary connections between humans and the world, but the mode of inputting and outputting information has already been formed by established rules according to the era. This project aims to renegotiate the order and sequence of a set structure through the lens of indeterminacy. By redesigning ways of seeing and communicating, it influences and reshapes the process of knowing.

How we understand/analyse human cognition is subject to certain conventions: most of us accept things that seem natural without awareness or questioning, we follow and then obey. How we perceive information is heavily influenced by the way we are taught to read and react. Roland Barthes talked about the power of representation in his book Mythologies, how objects and signs mean more than they seem. Barthes was concerned about how connotations (the implied aspect) become denotations, and he questioned how messages are understood through analysing social stereotypes.

John Cage incorporated chance composition in his music works. Certain elements in the composed work are left to be decided by the performer’s will, therefore the same work can be played in various versions. He defined it as ‘the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways’ (Pritchett, 1993, p.108). Likewise, this ongoing project consists of a series of small experiments, and it starts with adapting randomness into an unconventional dialoguing. The experiments focus on questioning and diverging on our common perception by employing an approach of selected choices.

Ulrich Baer once said, ‘blindness may offer an escape from the tyranny of the visual that overwhelms the poet’ (Baer, 2000, p.113) in his Remnants of Song. Similarly, we can understand blindness as directionless or indeterminacy – the blindness to authority, the blindness not as an inability to see but a refusal to look into the only direction that’s been given. The experiments in the project incorporate the idea of chance into the mechanism of seeing the world, they disarrange and rearrange the procedure of our interactions, which establishes new interpretations of already existing visual elements.

I am not designing an outcome, but instead a process that results in different outcomes. This project hopes to challenge common ideologies, and to subvert our ingrained conventions on absorbing and interpreting information, and to promote a change in behavioural habits.

Same set of stones are randomly arranged according to the lines on them therefore generate different outlines, shapes and patterns. Figure 1–3 belong to one group of stones and figure 4–8 belong to another.

There are two systems when playing this cube, the common one is with colours, but if player focuses on puzzling up the foreground letters, it naturally disrupts the rule from the regular system by the idea of indeterminacy.

In this mapping experiment, I am letting my music list guide me to a meandering path. The shuffle mode and length of the music will determine my route. I keep going straight until the song switches, then I make a turn at the upcoming intersection to the direction that is nearest to me, and I take a photo of that turning. Random selections bring new interpretations and perspectives.

What is the relationship between the language of light and expression of human emotions?

In this project my aim is to explore the relationship between the language of light and the expression of human emotions. My initial research was about the relationship between the human ideology of consumption and the added value of a product. In the course of my research, I interviewed and explored a product, in this case, a table lamp and found that my need for an object such as a table lamp is not only its lighting function but also its role as a listener to my stories half the time, which is an extra value given by my interpretation.

The objects in our surroundings are capable of carrying memories, feelings, and emotions, according to the approach of this research. At the same time, I am thinking about how a lamp responds or expresses its thoughts and emotions, how it becomes a storyteller or a responder to information. Talking to objects is a mode of emotional expression that people engage in to a greater or lesser extent, and even more so in people who live alone. In this process, I have tried to select a possible trajectory of light movement to describe the emotions the lamp might be trying to convey during the interview. This also includes an exploration of the rhythm of the light movement, the possibility of whether the colour of the light needs to be changed by the lamp or by its operator, and whether it should be accompanied by sound and other elements.

Light is an essential element for humans, and I think I will be looking more deeply into the relationship between light language and human emotions, possibly with experimental images or visualising the language of light. Light can present a very strong visual effect, and when the identity of light changes from being a listener to a storyteller, how do people reflect differently to such a strong visual language of light? The final presentation is intended to be an experiential design exhibition, where the language of light is experienced in a totally dark space, and I am also considering the healing effect of light in that total darkness, the different reflections of people and the rewards of people’s experiences in the space and atmosphere.

This is an experimental short film about an interview, in which I focus on exploring how does the lamp as an interviewee responds to my questions. It is a non-verbal exploration of what the language of objects looks like and is the beginning of my research interest. Here are some screenshots of the interview, where the lamp’s responses include flickering, shaking, focusing, scattering, and glitching.