HYBRID ECOLOGIES
CREATIVE LAB
The Lexicon of Wish
The Lexicon of Wish aims to connect the past and the future, tradition and technology, and to reconnect human and nature through using AI to code contemporary people’s wish as nonexistent plants based on the plants of the real and myths of the past. The nonexistent plants is a poetically deliver a uncertain and plural futures.
Wish-Plant AI Generative Model
Based on the visual style of Chinese aesthetics, the team trained a non-binary AI generative model. We selected ancient Chinese literary works such as Shan Hai Jing, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Youyang Zazu, which contain a wealth of mythical stories and plant imagery that reflect the simple wishes of ancient Chinese people.
Dynamic Digital World
"Wish" is the purest and most sincere spiritual force in people's hearts. Today, people spend a significant amount of time exploring the virtual digital world, with social media becoming a gathering place for expressing "wishes." Whether sincerely or playfully, individuals voice their desires, and posts, one after another, collectively form a modern landscape of wishes. We scrape data about wishes from the internet in real time and use TouchDesigner to convert it into radar charts that are suitable for AI learning. The generative model, based on these encoded wishes, connects the past and present, generating non-existent plants as representations of wishes, visualizing human hopes, and creating an aspirational future spiritual world.
To cope with contemporary terrible vibes. Living in the city, people are surrounded by countless social issues, Increasingly harsh environment problems and upsetting social trends, such as the downturn of global economic, high unemployment rate and wars. It's worsen for the younger generations who are buried in the virtual digital world. They are overcomed by a mass of awful information and gradually lose hopes for the future, even lose themselves in this man-made world. Contemporary people are being and living in negative moods and terrible vibes.
To explore an imaginative context for human to be and live. In myths in ancient China, “xiangong” is a wonderland filled with unique and rare plants, symbolizing beautiful wishes and anticipation from ancient people. They imagined an ideal world where is no pain and grief but hapiness and blessedness. The project tries to create this world in digital with AI, as there are few ways for contemporary people to live through their daily life with a positive mood and a sense of meaning. Exploring an imaginative context for human to be and live nowadays, the project uses “xiangong” as a metaphor to acquire magical power from ancient times and to bring it to the present and the future.
The Values of Collective Uncertain
In the intermediate stage of training our generative model, we introduced a human-controlled breakpoint— a radar chart— to represent textual "wish." We integrated traditional Chinese auspicious culture, including the concepts of "Fu, Lu, Shou, Xi, Cai" (blessings, wealth, longevity, joy, and fortune), with contemporary mainstream value systems (such as Schwartz's value theory) to analyze the "wish" in the text. Using TouchDesigner, we converted this analysis into radar charts suitable for AI learning. This analysis, combining ancient and contemporary concepts of wish, allows the AI to maximize the retention of the original meaning of "wish" in the text, while also providing better interpretability for contemporary data.
Credits
Team members: Shenhuan Lu, Wenjia Shi, Ruiyi Li
Guidance: Yue Zou
Technical guidance: Zheng Tian, Quan Li
