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Cracked Words
GENERATIVE DESIGN, CYBER ACTIVISM,
KINETIC TYPE, P5.JS
2020
The Internet has never been the perceived "space of free expression" for some people.
Cracked Words is a web tool that assists you to bypass the “watching eyes” and express freely on the Internet. A series of algorithms are created to disrupt the words in a way that is still readable to humans, but can bypass the OCR (optical character recognition) censors.
Inspiration & Further Research
This piece was inspired by a mass internet anti-censorship movement across Chinese social media. In the beginning of COVID, an interview article about a Wuhan whistleblower doctor being disciplined on charges of “spreading rumors” went viral on Chinese social media, shortly before wiped out by internet censors. In response to it, Chinese netizens resorted to hundreds of creative ways to save this article from vanishing, by rewriting it in calligraphy, flipping it upside down, filling it with emojis, translating it into fictional languages, and then sharing it in a relay ↓
image collection of Chinese netizen's creative ways of dodging the censor in WeChat
The first three algorithms for bypassing the censors are inspired by those cases mentioned above. Through further technical research on how the censor algorithm operates in the major social media platforms, I will develop more algorithmic tactics as part of this web toolkit. Master thesis "Building a generative web tool for combating internet censorship in Chinese social media" workingin process.
Made with
P5.js
Text source
人物 magazine
Typeface
Source Han Serif
Exhibited at
VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN 2020, an Online AI x Art Exhibition
RISTIAALLOKKO | CROSS WAVES 2021, Helsinki, Finland
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