Synthetic Eros

Synthetic Eros uses design as translated experience that confronts a cultural taboo, the absence and pornographication of erotism, and the lack of sex education in Chinese culture. It aims to create an immersive and sensory experience to provoke reflection.

Machine Learning
Python 
Physical Computing

We are in an age where things get pornographicated vastly.

I want to provoke reflection and challenge the existing relationship between sex, individual and society through the revival of Eros.

Eroticism is a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love. Pornography, on the other hand, is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Tho these two topics seem too many a world of difference, the boundary between the two is sheer and delicate. Both exist in the circumstances of a liberated sex environment. In historical and contemporary china, the repression against sex has always been present, which marks the death of erotic culture.

Device

My audience’s incapability was analogies to the way blind people sense the world. So I made a vibrating device that translates the sequence to sensory feedback with captive proximity interactive function enabled by conducive prints. When the device is being touched, it vibrates and plays the sequences in hyper speed as if it is engaging in the erotic experiences with the user.

Animation

Inspired by the work “Studies in Perception I” by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton in 1967, a large scale print made from a nude translated into electronic symbols, being the first nude ever published on the New York Times; I used Unicode to encode typographic unicodes to play with perceptions and censorships.
How much information is needed to make people feel the Eros? The Unicodes was carefully curated from Chinese erotic idiom, decompose by the python programme that I modified with an open-source library to make a typographical animation.

Process

The Generative adversarial network produces erotic moving images with a dataset collection, including work from the period where erotism was most celebrated, modernism paintings, and nature symbols. The symbolic plants and landscape are conceptually in line with the haziness and blurriness of Eros and lower down the risk of any explicit imagery, which violates Eros.

The Device was made of 12 vibration sensors that translates the pixel information of the video accordingly. It receive data from the capacitive sensor made from a foil or copper print, and controls the speed of videop playback and vibration signal.