Cangjie

Humans and machines are in constant conversations. Humans start the dialogue by using programming languages that will be compiled to binary digits that machines can interpret. However, Intelligent machines today are not only observers of the world, but they also make their own decisions. If A.I imitates human beings to create a symbolic system to communicate based on their own understandings of the universe and start to actively interact with us, how will this recontextualize and redefine our coexistence in this intertwined reality? To what degree can the machine enchant us in curiosity and enhance our expectations of a semantic meaning-making process? Cangjie provides a data-driven interactive spatial visualization in semantic human-machine reality. The visualization is generated by an intelligent system in real-time through perceiving the real-world via a camera (located in the exhibition space). Inspired by Cangjie, an ancient Chinese legendary historian (c.2650 BCE), who invented Chinese characters based on the characteristics of everything on the earth, we trained a neural network, we have named Cangjie, to learn the constructions and principles of all the Chinese characters. It transforms what it perceives into a collage of unique symbols made of Chinese strokes. The symbols produced through the lens of Cangjie, tangled with the imagery captured by the camera, are visualized algorithmically as abstracted, pixelated semiotics, continuously evolving and composing an everchanging poetic virtual reality. Cangjie is not only a conceptual response to the tension and fragility in the coexistence of humans and machines but also an artistic imagined expression of a future language that reflects on ancient truths in this artificial intelligence era. The interactivity of this intelligent visualization prioritizes ambiguity and tension that exist between the actual and the virtual, machinic vision and human perception, and past and future.