Unerasable Characters Series
– Ars Electronica 2023, Artificial Intelligence & Life Art, Golden Nica
Key words – Social Media, unreadable/unerasable, censorship
Summary – The Unerasable Series consists of three works, each exploring the silenced voices under digital censorship through different modes of presentation. The first part is based on input data processed with machine learning and results in an unreadable 6,000-page physical book, challenging the conventional use of machine learning for precision and efficient production. The second part is a custom software that scrapes censored posts in real time, decomposing each post into individual characters, with the duration of each character’s display corresponding to the post’s actual visibility on the platform. The third part presents censored posts in a content-obscured format, preserving punctuation, emojis, and special characters, thus conveying the rhythm of silence and disappearance.
