Vaguely Familiar
Sijing Xie
The construction of familiarity is an essential part of enhancing human cognition and behavior, and also a prerequisite for our being in the world. However, familiarity can also lead to automatic, habituated activities and aesthetics. Starting from the condition of the “vaguely familiar,” I investigated the contextual backgrounds of defamiliarization. This research seeks to provide an opportunity to re-imagine what we have already defined, destroy ingrained habits of perception, constantly create the new, and subvert and defamiliarize that which is ingrained in us.
To standardize one feature of round things, such as their diameter, I photographed many round items, such as the lid of a bottle, a bowl, a pot, etc. I try to make familiar things strange, so this is the reason why I choose everyday objects as representatives of our life. In this project, we can find renewed interest when every round object has the same diameter, which breaks our general impression of the objects.
Narrative can provide a way to defamiliarize people's cognition of everyday objects. Firstly, people who tell the story, the narrative methods, and story plots can all arouse people's interest. Secondly, sublimating or changing the context of everyday objects can make people experience the vaguely familiar. So on this basis, the design response is a movie poster and a movie trailer of a mockumentary. The protagonist for this movie is a smartphone—an everyday object used prevalently in this day and age, and an extremely familiar item to all of us. By using narrative, this object tells a story which will make people feel creepy, arouse deep thinking about our inherent desire.
The project “Re-decode and quantified self” combines twitter bot and the concept of the quantified self, to defamiliarize people’s face — a characteristic feature of humans, and symbol of personal identity. By setting up self-preferences and directing comments, the twitter bot executes its function on its own, automatically tweeting or leaving a message below one’s favorite singer account. All of the tweets and posts simulate the behavior and preference of people.
All of the data we collect forms a figure of human portrait, with project mapping, this installation aims to project data directly on people’s body to convey the implication that all of our characteristics could be explained through data. This project could provide a new way for the audience to think about how to defamiliarize the self through technology like project mapping and Artificial Intelligence, and through this to ask the questions: what we do really concerned? Do we care about ourselves or the data itself?
This project shows 100 movie stills from IMDB Top 250 movies. I hope people can find a vague sense of familiarity from these movie scenes without appearance of specific characters.
Titles of films