STAND BY/ME

Yu Zhang

STAND BY/ME is an interactive installation that uses machine-learning models to generate speeches for Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump, and uses randomness to build virtual conversations for political spectrum, while connecting the information flow with the lived reality of the Everyday. Visitors are exposed to narratives of both digital communism and digital capitalism that is randomly controlled. Next to the visual flow of randomly generated speeches, the work involves seemingly mundane, yet “super-charged” electrical household items, i.e., power sockets, as the actuality of human-technology confrontation. This work allows visitors to feel like they are on “stand by” and triggers questions about how technologism impacts individuals' views and information consumption, while people face randomly generated political speech as a quiet, mundane confrontation.

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Dr. Yu Zhang has a background in fine arts and design. Over the past years, she has designed and researched interactive systems that respond to Everyday phenomena, environmental concerns, child-system interaction, online collaboration platforms, and uncertainty in data visualization. Her book “Coding Art”, co-authored with Mathias Funk, was published by Apress/Springer in 2021.