No. 250

Type Writer Analogue

By : Eva He

Entrant’s location : United Kingdom

Description

An interactive installation composed of a computer keyboard and a hacked thermal printer. Instead of letter keys, the keyboard has fully functional words keys. Once a few keys are pressed, the sentence/ phrase will be instantly printed out through the hacked receipt printer, forming a messy long roll of receipts with slogan-like statements on it. The words made available on the keyboard are abstracted from the website called the most popular political issues of the year. Selected words are the most used ones among those political issues names.

What did you create?

Why did you make it?

I created this piece at a time when I was on an exchange study in the Netherlands. I felt the inability to use big/ideological words, such as "freedom" and "discrimination" to communicate with my peers who held different social-political believes/ideals. Interestingly, they possess the same vocabulary when they argued about the "discrimination against white male" and, more shockingly, when they used "freedom of speech" to comment on transgender people as being "fake". With this piece, I want to interrogate the failure of communication; open up the opportunity up for people to exploit and spoil "big words" so as to realize that words are pliable. At the end of the day, the piece is a reflection onto the online political debate culture where further driven-apart between groups are taking place.

How did you make it?

I wrote a computer programme to change the letter input into word input from the keyboard sign and hacked the thermal printer to output the info. The installation's programme is run on a raspberry pi.

Your entry’s specification

interactive installation. receipt-printer, Bluetooth keyboard, computer board. size variable need to be plugged-in when operating