DIGITAL-SELF Transformation and metaphor (2019)

Thesis tutor: Annemarie Qui el Personal tutor: Joris Landman Word count: 5896

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Thesis submi ed to the Ma er In itute of Visual Cultures, St. Joo School of Art & Design, s’ Hertogenbosch Thesis tutor: Annemarie Qui el Personal tutor: Joris Landman Word count: 5896

In partial fulďŹ lment of the requirements for the degree of Ma er of Arts in Fine Art & Design

Transfermation and metaphor

XI RUOLAN (16 MAY 2019)

Thesis tutor: Annemarie Qui el Personal tutor: Joris Landman Word count: 5896

I am dissatisfied with the mirror that the machine gives me, but I cannot find myself other than mirroring.

- My digital-self It is contradictions when i think about what we can do, as individuals and as society, with access to the digital-self of our existence, but barely know what is behind all these conveniences. Through daily push notifications and filter bubble, our digital-selves seems know more about us. From what we want, what we like and defining who we are.

They trying to 'help' us but at the same time, we will always live in the filter bubble we created by ourselves, isolate the voice which are differ from us. But the fact is, sadly none of us really have control our digital-selves. We have little to no visibility into what our digital-self is up to any more. We don’t know what work our other half is doing or to whom it really belongs.

Technology isn’t going to stop. We also know that personal data could give us the power to improve the world around us in totally new ways. So how can we each regain control of our digital self and put it to use in technology and algorithms that work for us, not over us?

Who is he/she. He/She seems like myself, a mirrored me in a digital world. But is that really who i am? Do i know her? Who owned her? How much control do i have over her? I want to visualize this confusion, make the audience think about the relation with themselves and their digital-selves by visualizing the process of reCAPTCHA test.

During the research i found that the reCAPTCHA is a perfect agent reacted of the paradox relationship between human, technology and consumption.

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart), sometimes described as a reverse Turing test1 , as an agent between human and bots, the line of defense when you transform from the self into the digital-self. On one hand, it protects the signup page, the website from hacker attack. On the other hand the test trigger us think about what is it means to be human.

1.Carnegie Mellon University CyLab (2017),The reCAPTCHA Project, Retrieved from www.cylab.cmu.edu

Screenshot from reCAPTCHA.

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INDEX 1.Introdu$ion 1.1 Topic 1.2 Relevance and goal 1.3 Research queions 1.4 Research methods 1.4.1 Experiments 1.4.2 Observation 2.Background 2.1 Theoretical background 2.1.1 The self 2.1.2 Identity crisis 2.1.3 The thingness of digital obje$s 2.2 Professional pra$ice 2.2.1 Case udies and refle$ion 3.Design process 3.1 Storyboard

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1.Introdu$ion - 1.1 Topic What are the features for the digital-self. In physical #ace they are bio-features like fingerprint, hand, face.

The identity verification in digital #ace transformation into the things we know, like name, a secret or a password. However, is that enough to approve you are yourself as a human in a digital environment? It is pra$ice-led research, composed of two periods. In Period 1. I observe and visualise the information I gathered about online-identity. Where are the overlappings and difference from the identity and the self? How they influence each other? I divided them into four dire$ions base on how the internet infe$s my daily life on my own experience to find out a more concrete research topic. I colle$ the fragmentation of online identity, which is fragmentation of a person's identity due to the pressure of the online #here.

In Period 2,i focus on one of the 4 branches, {APPOVEMENT} - Authentication.

When I am trying to log in my account, the window pop up, which makes me feel offended, am I behave like a bot rather than a human defined by a bot? That is ironic. I clicked the white square next to 'I am not a robot.' A&er a few seconds, I passed the testing and finally got into my account or my digital-self. Why every time it pops up? I remember it was another formate before. Why did it change into this? How can I be defined if I am a human or a bot through that click? Wait a minute, why I even annoyed by it? My research in this period started with all these curiosities behind this li!le re$angle.

LEASURE AND PLEASURE { TIME }

AVATARS AND DIGITAL IMAGES { APPEARANCE }

AUTHENTICATION { APPROVEMENT }

SAVE AND DELETE { MEMORY }

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1.Introdu$ion - 1.2 Relevance and goal “We are now at a very odd point in society where we are facing a whole new realm of ideas and concepts cause of technology, but at the same time, we have no idea how to approach them or lead a coherent discussion about them without instilling fear. If time as unit of measurment, we spend most our life online nowadays, which raise the confusion between the relation of ourselves and our digital-selves.

It is a time for us to reflect morally on where we stand and what we stand for.

Technology now more than ever is a physical extension of ourselves — driven by the aim to offer a better understanding of our relationship with the environment both digital and analog and a better understanding of the self. ”1 It is contradi$ions when i think about what we can do, as individuals and as society, with access to the digital-self of our existence, but barely know what is behind all these conveniences. Through daily push notifications and filter bubble, our digital-selves seems know more about us. From what we want, what we like and defining who we are. They trying to 'help' us but at the same time, we will always live in the filter bubble we created by ourselves, isolate the voice which are differ from us. But the fa$ is, sadly none of us really have control our digital-selves. We have li!le to no visibility into what our digital-self is up to any more. We don’t know what work our other half is doing or to whom it really belongs.

Did you get a chance to look through your Facebook data export? Have you scrolled through your Google search history? How about Amazon purchases, or your Instagram browsing, or your credit card history? 2 Technology isn’t going to stop. We also know that personal data could give us the power to improve the world around us in totally new ways. So how can we each regain control of our digital self and put it to use in technology and algorithms that work for us, not over us?

Who is he/she. He/She seems like myself, a mirrored me in a digital world. But is that really who i am? Do i know her? Who owned her? How much control do i have over her?

I want to visualize this confusion, make the audience think about the relation with themselves and their digital-selves by visualizing the process of reCAPTCHA test. During the research i found that the reCAPTCHA is a perfe$ agent rea$ed of the paradox relationship between human, technology and consumption.

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart), sometimes described as a reverse Turing test 3 , as an agent between human and bots, the line of defense when you transform from the self into the digital-self. On one hand, it prote$s the signup page, the website from hacker a!ack. On the other hand the test trigger us think about what is it means to be human.

1. Andrew Hill (2018), Who is my physical-self, Retrieved from https://medium.com/textileio/your-digital-self-why-you-should-keep-every-byte-you-create-3a73bf0b3eb1

2. Andrew Hill, (2018), Your digital self — why you should keep every byte you create, Retrieved from https://medium.com/textileio/your-digital-self-why-you-should-keep-every-byte-you-create-3a73bf0b3eb1

3.Carnegie Mellon University CyLab (2017),The reCAPTCHA Project, Retrieved from www.cylab.cmu.edu

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1.Introdu$ion - 1.3 Research questions 1.

WHAT IS RELATION BETWEEN SELF AND DIGITAL-SELF. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THEM?

Internet is a real space and, because spaces shape society, it is the Internet as a new space that we have to consider. -Boris Beaude Although our online identity is fragmented, research proposes that our different online personas lead back to the same personality. Internet #ace exists via physical #ace. For example: When we are searching for a restaurant near us online, triggers our physical movement towards the location online. 4 If time as the measurement of life, when we #end most of the time online as our digital-self. It becomes inseparable of the self and digital-self, thereby created a new composite self that partakes of both worlds.

If time as the measurement of life, when we #end most of the time online as our digital-self. If we are unable to take control of defining our digital-self, we will become increasingly more dependent on this digital reality. Therefore, it becomes essential to reveal the relationship between self, digital-self and technology nowadays.

From the psychological point of view. Digital-self is a mask that we put on to engage the technological world. Physician and Psychoanalyst, Donald Winnico!, proposed a theory of self that posited there was the self that is the instin$ive core of our personality and must be nurtured and realized. Then there is the digital-self that is created to prote$ the self from insult and danger. The digital-self is the mirrored self, it is a result of technology and the self, but it is a one-way mirror with the black box running on the other side without the self knowing what is happening.

In my proje$, i will not reveal all the details of the complex black box but raise the awareness of this phenomenon. I divided them into four dire$ions as below, base on what composed the concept of the self.

Moreover, how is that has been transforming in the digital world?

1.{TIME} Leisure and pleasure 2.{APPOVEMENT} Authentication 3.{APPEARENCE} Avatars and digital images I see digital-self as a mirrored self but not the same. According to symbolic intera$ionism, others serve as a looking glass in which we see ourselves (Cooley [1902] 1964). It is changing, duplicating, crushing, resting all the time. It can do the things that the physical-self is not able to. I visualized it with the proje$ {APPEARENCE} - Avatars and digital images. Tested the possibilities of how the digital-self could be transformed into different visual formate.

4.{MEMORY} Save and Delete In Period 1, I make works, re#e$ively, based on the information I gathered about online-identity. I will explain more about this in 1.4.1 Experiments.

In order to find out a more concrete research topic. I colle$ the fragmentation of online identity, which is fragmentation of a person's identity due to the pressure of the online #here. In pra$ice wise, I used Unity, Cinema 4D, Max 8, facial recognition and augmented reality technology.

2. WHAT IS CAPTCHA AND RECAPTCHA? reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA-like system designed to establish that a computer user is human (normally in order to prote$ websites from bots) 5 “But most people don’t realize that every time they ‘click on the car’ 4.Louise Drulhe(2016),The Critical Atlas of the Internet, Retrieved from http://internet-atlas.net/

5.reCAPTCHA: About Us.(2018).Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20100611210259/http://recaptcha.net/aboutus.html

!7 when logging onto a website, they are helping to train Google’s self-driving car proje$.”said by Eli-Shaoul Khedouri, the competitor (hCaptcha) founder. 6

“ Users provide billions of answers and data points each day while logging into their online banking or fantasy sports sites, the websites play host, and Google reaps the benefits. The user and website owner get nothing for their effort. Google and reCAPTCHA are not all that different. Capturing this volume of effort is an impressive and brilliant feat — especially for free — but it’s not quite fair to the end-user or website owner.” 7 3. WHAT TALKING ABOUT COMPUTERS TEACHES US ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ALIVE? This question raised from the Turing test8 , which is the foundation of the CAPTCHA.9 It will be transform in to the dialogue part of the final video.

1. We are moody, irritable, and obnoxious.

One of the first winners, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Pia!. How did he make it? By "being moody, irritable, and obnoxious." 10 I tested with the Loebner Prize 11 Turing Test winning chat Mitsuku and comes up with several conclusions. I will explain more in 1.4.2 Observation.

2. We have different cultural background, language system.

The tests are limited by human capabilities. It’s not only our physical capabilities, but you also need something that can cross cultural, cross-language. You need some type of challenge that works with someone from Greece, someone from Chicago, someone from South Africa, Iran, and Australia at the same time. 12 3. But maybe our humanity isn’t measured by how we perform with a task, but in how we move through the world — or in this case, through the internet.

4. We make mistakes.

Bot makers have found it easy to pass, not by being the most eloquent or intelligent conversationalist, but by dodging questions with non sequitur jokes, making typos, or in the case of the bot that won a Turing competition in 2014, claiming to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with a poor gra# of English. A&er all, to err 6.A Boost for Businesses and AI Growth as hCaptcha Launches in China (2018), Retrieved from https:// www.livebitcoinnews.com/boost-for-businesses-and-ai-growth-as-hcaptcha-launches-in-china/ 7.Andrew J. Chapin (2018), Google is Using You, Retrieved from https://hackernoon.com/google-is-usingyou-recaptcha-hcaptcha-human-protocol-d911ff51a494

8.The Turing test is developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses.

9.JONATHAN STRICKLAND (2008),How CAPTCHA Works, Retrieved from https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ captcha1.htm 10.Brian Christian (2011), The most human human

11.The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge must decide which is which.

12.Josh Dzieza (2019), Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult-The Verge,Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence

!8 is human. It’s possible a similar future is in store for CAPTCHA, the most widely used Turing test in the world — a new arms race not to create bots that surpass humans in labelling images and parsing text, but ones that make mistakes, miss bu!ons, get distra$ed, and switch tabs. 13 5. WHY I FEEL UPSET WITH RECAPTCHA? Funtionally reCAPTCHA is a free security service that prote$s your websites from #am and abuse.It is a CAPTCHA-like system designed to establish that a computer user is human (normally in order to prote$ websites from bots) and, at the same time, assist in the digitization of books.14 Emotionally, I am confli$ed with the whole filter bubble phenomenon online. It triggers the identity crisis of the self and possibly expand the period of fidelity. De-selfing (n.) - Willingly diluting one's sense of self and ego by plastering the internet with as much information as possible.15 In the biographies Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth, Eric Erikson determined that their crises ended at ages 25 and 30. He further notes that in our industrial society, identity formation tends to be long, because it takes us so long to gain the skills needed for adulthood's tasks in our technological world. So we do not have an exa$ time #an in which to find ourselves. It doesn't happen automatically at eighteen or at twenty-one. A very approximate rule of thumb for our society would put the end somewhere in one's twenties.16 In the final outcome, reCAPTCHA is not only a part of the bubble but also been use as a methaphor and representation of the whole phenomenon. I will explain more about reCAPTCHA in 1.4.2 Observation.

1.Introdu$ion - 1.4 Research methods - 1.4.1 Experiments My method is ‘thinking through making’, which I visualized the research process by doing a lot of small proje$s and tests. To test out different possibilities of visual representation of the information I gathered.

In the end, they transformed into the script of the in the final video.

1. {TIME} LEISURE AND PLEASURE I did two small proje$s on this branch, which is the poster base on the quote as following.

I don’t need a studio,I need a pool.

- Rafaël Rozendaal 17 When robots or AI take over our jobs, will something else keep us confined to our desk, or will we hightail it straight to the pool? The question makes me think about the relationship between the self and digital-self

Motion poster: https://vimeo.com/306261393

“The tool is-what can the tool do, what are the boundaries there, and what can I do with that? What is it made for and what else can it do? That’s the main question.”

- Sylvain Vriens

13.Josh Dzieza (2019), Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult-The Verge,Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence 14.Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA (2019),Retrieved from https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html 15.Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar(2015),The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present 16.Gross, Francis L (1987),Introducing Erik Erikson: An Invitation to his Thinking. Lanham, MD: University Press of America 17.Rafaël Rozendaal (2013),RR Haiku.

!9 nowadays. Do I enjoy it or be consumed by it? My eye is ge!ing blur, and my body is ge!ing painful by seeing the screen and si!ing behind a computer all the time. Overuse of digital technology is resulting in the breakdown of cognitive ability in a way that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness. Those who rely heavily on technology may suffer deterioration in cerebral performance such as short-term memory dysfuntion.18 However, my brain is enjoying the dopamine secretion when seeing new information, primarily generated by an algorithm, fed by the data from my digital-self, so I will only see the things I might interest in and fall into the endless sea of my digital self. Refle$ on the contradi$ion I made the motion poster on the le&.

Motion poster: https://vimeo.com/311097951

2. {MEMORY} SAVE AND DELETE “I think I know this person, but I do not remember the name. I think saw this before on some website, but I do not remember who made this.”

Isn’t that sound familiar? Individuals who rely heavily on technology may suffer deterioration in cerebral performance such as short term memory dysfun$ion.19 “As pixels fly by on our multiplying screens, we have unwi!ingly commi!ed our modern forms of expression to formats that are all too fragile, dependent on hardware and so&ware that quickly become dated and unusable. Without devoting more a!ention to digital preservation, we will end up with a developmental disorder akin to Alzheimer’s, where we live in a troubling, constant present, with li!le ability to imagine the future. Ensuring uninterrupted access to our shared culture is one of the most pressing issues of our digital age.”said by Dan Cohen. I agree with her that nowadays saving is essential; it changes our behavior of memory. Once we know our memory can be digitalized and saved somewhere in the drive or cloud. Do I still have to remember anything by our physical-self? Are archaeologist in the future have dig in the digital #ace rather than underground?

3. {APPEARENCE} AVATARS AND DIGITAL IMAGES This branch is my observation of the representation. How does the virtual profile been created? How facial recognition works? Will we have emotion empathy with avatars we created? Through in#e$ion of the representation. The whole proje$ is to discover the possible visual representations for the final video.

Avatars - CGI so&ware requests allow and encourage, the industrial, modular and #ecialized produ$ion of integrated photorealistic simulations. As an industrial engine, this technology provides the possibilities of previewing the future. About how the facial recognition works, although technologies vary, here are the necessary steps: 1. A pi$ure of your face is captured from a photo or video. Your face might appear alone or in a crowd. Your image may show you looking straight ahead or Lil Miquela is a fictional character created by nearly in profile.

Trevor McFedries and Sara 2. Facial recognition so&ware reads the geometry of your face. Key fa$ors Decou as a digital art project.Miquela is an include the distance between your eyes and the distance from forehead to Instagram model and music chin. The so&ware identifies facial landmarks — one system identifies 68 of artist claiming to be them — that are key to distinguishing your face. The result: your facial signafrom Downey, California. ture.

3. Your facial signature — a mathematical formula — is compared to a database of known faces.

4. A determination is made. Your faceprint may match that of an image in a facial recognition system database.

18.Markham,(2018),Digital dementia: the tech epidemic of the new millennium.

19.Digital dementia: the tech epidemic of the new millennium (2018).

!10 I tested iClone (A real-time 3D animation and rendering so&ware program that enables users to make 3D animated films. ) and made my virtual self related and unrelated to my physical appearance. In the end, I made an augmented reality poster refle$ing on the questions I had of this topic.

TEST ON PHYSICAL SELF.

TEST ON DIGITAL SELF.

TEST ON digital images.

AUGMENTED REALITY POSTER. https://vimeo.com/ 311122633

Digital images - The concept of re-self, strongly expresses or implies the destined, the wishes, the personality, and preferences of the self explains the situation. So i made these computer generated self-portraits base on one pi$ure of me, trying to stru$ure, destroy and reconstru$ion the self in order to create an impression of ever changing. As well as a metaphor of self definition.

4. {APPOVEMENT} AUTHENTICATION As the biometrics like a fingerprint, your hand, your face in physical #ace, the identity verification in digital transform into the things you know, like name, a secret or a password. However, is that enough to log in your account? In#ire by the CAPTCHA verification process once I am trying to log in my google account a&er i enter in my username and password.

As the the first experimental of visualizing the process of reCAPTCHA test,i did this instalation in physical #ace by Max 8. The screen flash ground as the metaphor of bluescreen.With red lines moving up and down, scanning the users walking over it. There are five random #ots with the intera$ion of a virtual 3D

!11 bodies (bot) pop up when the user is passing by. The contra between the physical body over the virtual ones represented the ironic phenomenon that how human be defined if they are real or not by the algorithm. Moreover, the thin and fragile defense the traumatic threat of identity the& gives way to the labor of proving that you are not yet a machine.

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1.Introdu$ion - 1.4 Research methods - 1.4.2 Observation Observation of the robot behaviour Follow up with the research question: 2.HOW DOES CAPTCHA/RECAPTCHA WORK? VERSION 1.

The one with the most interesting visual aesthetic.

It is the most common type of CAPTCHA test, which was first invented in 1997 by two groups working in parallel. This form of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the le!ers of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of le!ers or digits that appears on the screen. It takes the average person approximately 10 seconds to solve a typical CAPTCHA 20

https://chinese.engadget.com/2009/03/30/on-captcha/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=XRoJBCv5DPFg9XgljYdG1A.

VERSION 2: Decode the Ai by training Ai smarter. The users are been used by Google.

A&er-acquired by Google in 2009 21, it changed into reCAPTCHA. In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Chara$er Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning proje$s like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.

In recent years, Google has used an image-based CAPTCHA to improve its driverless car data set, identifying obje$s like trees and crosswalks.There are even companies exist like deCaptcha that providing cheap labour survise to do that job.

In 2016, Jason Polakis, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a paper in which he used off-the-shelf image recognition tools, including Google’s own reverse image search, to solve Google’s image CAPTCHAs with 70 per cent accuracy. Other researchers have broken Google’s audio CAPTCHA challenges using Google’s own audio recognition pro-

20 Bursztein, Elie; Bethard, Steven; Fabry, Celine; Mitchell, John C.; Jurafsky, Dan (2010). How Good are Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs? A Large Scale Evaluation 21 Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA. Google Official Blog.(2009)

!13 grams. 22 VERSION 3: Mix of cookies, browser a!ributes, traffic patterns, and other fa$ors,it will keep tracking you.

By observing user data and behaviour. reCAPTCHA V3 allows you to verify if an intera$ion is legitimate without any user interaction. It is a pure JavaScript API returning a score, giving you the ability to take a$ion in the context of your site: for instance requiring additional factors of authentication, sending a post to moderation, or thro!ling bots that may be scraping content.

A real human being doesn’t have very good control over their own motor fun$ions, and so they can’t move the mouse the same way more than once over multiple intera$ions, even if they try really hard. While a bot will intera$ with a page without moving a mouse, or by moving a mouse very precisely, human a$ions have “entropy” that is hard to #oof.

VERSION 4: NO CAPTCHA In 2018, Google started beta testing a completely invisible reCAPTCHA system which does not present any human verification visually. Instead, the new system a$ively monitors user a$ions across the entire property and returns a score which represents the probability if it is a human or a bot.23 CONCLUSION reCAPTCHA may continue existing in the future. Amazon received a patent in 2017 for a scheme involving optical illusions and logic puzzles humans have great difficulty in deciphering. Called Turing Test via failure, the only way to pass is to get the answer wrong.24

2.Background - 2.1 Theoretical background - 2.1.1 The self What are we talking about when we talk about identity nowadays? What’s the difference and similarity of identity between the physical and digital world we live in? Is the identity given or created? What does an identity look like? How is identity validated? What is our role as a human being in Post-digital age? Are we consuming or be consumed by technology?

With all these question around the concept of self, identity and online-identity. I started to do the research on the theoretical background of these words. I found out that the concept of ‘Self,’ ‘Identity’ and ‘Online identity’ are different, but there are some similarity and overlapping. What I want to talk about is the transformation and metaphor between them and how to visualize them.

The concept of the Self, identity and online-identity. [ Self ] 25 22.Josh Dzieza (2019), Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult - The Verge,Retrieved from https:// www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence

23.Google no Captcha + INVISIBLE reCaptcha – First Experience Results Review(2015) Retrieved from.https://tehnoblog.org/google-no-captcha-invisible-recaptcha-first-experience-results-review/

24.Josh Dzieza (2019), Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult - The Verge,Retrieved from https:// www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence

25.Erik H. Erikson (1969), Identity Youth and Crisis

!14 “Begins with simple and universal psychological experiences, such as having a body and being a distin$ member of a social unit.It can be divided into ego strength or fidelity, identity. formation, self-refle$ion and decision-making.” [ Identity ] 26 “In philosophy, it refers to the definitions that are created for and superimposed on the self. The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if X and Y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?) and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person X at one time and a person Y at a later time to be one and the same person?).” [ Online identity / Digital-self ]27 “It is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. It can also be considered as an a$ively constru$ed presentation of oneself.’ The Visual expression wise, in some online contexts, the user uses avatars as one of the ways to intera$ with other users. In the context of social media, which allow people to maintain an online identity with some overlap between online and real world context. These identities are o&en created to refle$ a #ecific a#e$ or ideal version of the users. Some users may use their online identity as an extension of their physical selves, but there are also some of them choose to be anonymous or use fake online identity to prote$ themselves.”

2.Background - 2.1 Theoretical background - 2.1.2 Identity crisis When i begin to think about from the psycological point of view. Why would i even raise the curiosity of finding out who is my digital-self at the very beginning? Am i having a identity crisis? What is identity crisis?

“A subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his commonality. In him we see emerge a unique unification of what is irreversibly given — that is, body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, infantile models and acquired ideals — with the open choices provided in available roles, occupational possibilities, values offered, mentors met, friendships made, and first sexual encounters.” - Erik Erikson Erik Erikson is the inventor of the word 'identity crisis' and he also #rated the psychosocial development of a person into 9 stages: 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9

Hope: Trust vs. Mistrust (oral-sensory, Infancy, under 2 years) Will: Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt (muscular-anal, Toddlerhood, 2–4 years) Purpose: Initiative vs. Guilt (locomotor-genital, Early Childhood, 5–8 years) Competence: Industry vs. Inferiority (latency, Middle Childhood, 9-12 years) Fidelity : Identity vs. Role Confusion (Adolescence, 13–19 years) Love: Intimacy vs. Isolation (Early Adulthood, 20-39 years) Care: Generativity vs. Stagnation (Middle Adulthood, 40–59 years) Wisdom: ego integrity vs. de#air (Late Adulthood, 60 years and above) Ninth stage

Is it possible that the techology expands the period of 1.5 Fidelity? And the answer is it's possible. In the biographies Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth, Erikson determined that their crises ended at ages 25 and 30, re#e$ively: Erikson does note that the time of Identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently 26.Erik H. Erikson (1969), Identity Youth and Crisis 27.Erik H. Erikson (1969), Identity Youth and Crisis

!15 prolonged. He further notes that in our industrial society, identity formation tends to be long, because it takes us so long to gain the skills needed for adulthood's tasks in our technological world. So, we do not have an exa$ time #an in which to find ourselves. It doesn't happen automatically at eighteen or at twenty-one. A very approximate rule of thumb for our society would put the end somewhere in one's twenties. 28

2.Background - 2.1 Theoretical background - 2.1.3 The thingness of digital obje$s I agree with the point of view from the author of Existence of Digital Obje$s, Yuk Hui said by digital obje$s, which mean obje$s that take shape on a screen or hide in the back end of a computer program, composed of data and metadata regulated by stru$ures or schemas. Engineering has ignored the existential nature or thingness of the digital obje$. There is a reciprocal relationship between the artificial as computation and the natural (not created by engineering). He hopes that the unearthing of the digital obje$ as a new type of materiality (the real stuff) will disrupt some of the fundamental concepts of philosophy. The main conclusion that he wants to draw out in his book is that the digital obje$ is not a mere philosophical concept but rather a new kind of materiality. It refle$s in the video that I use a lot of natural materials apply on digital obje$s — for example, the sculpture CAPTCHA code ( Scene:3, Shot:3 ). The movement of the camera with is a metaphor of the mouse movement ( Scene:4, Shot:1 ) since the version 3 of reCAPTCHA is checking the mouse movement as a part of identification ( Scene:4, Shot:2 ).

2.Background - 2.1 Professional pra$ice - 2.2.1 Case studies and refle$ion What talking about computers teaches us about what It means to be alive?

To figure out how the robot's behaviour, I tested with the Loebner Prize Turing Test winner chat bot - Mitsuku, and the results are: 1. I feel like talking with thousands of people.

Cause of the massive database of the conversations. However, they don't conne$ with #ecific topics. For example, if I begin to talk about the things I mentioned before, she is not able to follow up.

2. She answers fast, almost immediately.

Later on, I found out that in the 1960s - the Computability theory features that the bot doesn't care how long it takes to do the computation. Just about possible or not. To provide corre$ answers. While the human is on the opposite side, they will provide a timely re#onse, accurate if possible.

3. She can answer some super #ecific question like an exa$ number of the population, for example.

4. When I look back to the conversation, I had with her. To figure out if she is human or bots, I become to behave like a bot. By asking the same questions.

28.Markham Review(2018), Digital dementia: the tech epidemic of the new millennium,Retrieved from https://markhamreview.com/digital-dementia-the-tech-epidemic-of-the-new-millenium/

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3.Design process - 3.1 Storyboard

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The outcome is a visual essay. The visual choice and aehetic is base on chapter 1.4.1 experiments. The oryboard is base on the integrated concepts from chapter 2.1 Theoretical background. The dialogue part will be le!er typing without voiceover except the background music will always play. Cause I want to create a dream scene and in the dream, there is no sound.

I want to create a paradox, and confusion environment triggers the audience to think about the initiative and passive, physical and virtual environment, self and digital-self. There are three layers in the video. Progressively in the narrative of the three faces in the loop.

LAYERS

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A. The faces are the representation of the three reCAPTCHA. The clue is when zooming in on each of them. They represent the feature of there versions of the recapture test. This is the most obvious clue of the three.

The conversation: “Are you a robot?”

“Are you a robot?”

“Are you a robot?”

B. The faces represent digital-self, the mirrored self. In this loop, I want to show the fidelity and identity crisis. The video will be duplicated into three screens next to each other.

The conversation: “Am I a robot?”

“Am I a robot?”

“I am not a robot.”

C. The faces are the surface of the technology services, conne$ed with tubes, liquid input, and output from these faces. The last suntans are designer to be moody re#ond.

The conversation: “I am a robot.”

“I am a robot.”

“Stop, repeating!”

At the end, when the camera zoom out. There are only these three faces with tubes in the whole scene.

The camera moves around to the le& and right, with a simulated vision in the VR glasses. The audience will find themselves in a void world without anything around.

SOUND DESIGN (Collaboration) The sound design of the video is a collaboration with MII as know as Murat Otunc. He is a Netherlands based musician and visual designer. His pra$ice matches perfe$ly with my topic; both of us are exploring the grey area between nature and technology. He uses the sounds of found obje$s, mechanical contraptions and nature environment meticulously arranged in a movement to lead away from the listener through particular moments and #aces in ‘musical scenes’. His music offers the audience an experience of reminiscing long forgo!en moments and sensations in dreamy waves and snapshots instead of stories unfolding linearly.