How Not To Be Looped
Author: Zhenzhen Qi
2020
A Step-By-Step Guide on Creating Meaningful Zones of Meaninglessness
Today, life seems increasingly prescribed, recursive, narrowing. Stories depicted by mainstream media is increasingly divided. What are the conditions that enabled such polarizing experiences? What is the language of our time, poetically and procedurally, that could rework such conditions? As artists, technologists, educators, and human being, what tools do we have that could activate the world, take it apart, multiply and transform it – to unloop?
How To Not be Looped is a series of interdisciplinary workshops exploring the concept of Unlooping. Using daily objects, software, and machine learning, it invites participants to reimagine alternative logics, conditions, and synthetic futures collectively made by the participants.
Lesson One – What Is A Loop
The most important things are looped:
Actions are looped;
Capital is looped;
News is looped;
Coded logic is looped.
A loop is formed when part of the output, feedback, effects of a system are routed back as inputs for future output.
This is a loop. It measures the number of electrons traveling out and inside the battery and decides if more electrons should travel to maintain the voltage of the circuit.
This is a loop. It measures money against other money and decides if more actions are needed to reach the goal of more money.
This is a loop. It measures the lack of action against the expectation and decides if more inactions are needed to maintain the order.
This is a loop inside a computer. It measures a state against a finite goal coded inside the software and calculates if more actions are needed to reach the goal.
Lesson Two: How To Test If You Are Being Looped?
- Take out your mobile phone, open up Gmail.
- Type the word “I”.
- Without think too much, start tapping on the words generated at the bottom of the screen
- Read the paragraph on your screen, count the word that’s repeated the most amount of times. The higher the count, the more “Looped” your digital life is.
Lesson Three: How to Unloop From A Track Field
Hide somewhere
Get injured
Pile up debris to jam the track
Teleport to a different dimension
Lesson Four: How to unloop by Becoming Useless
Use an old phone that can only text and call;
Install The Desktop Goose, a software application that turns your PC desktop into pure chaos;
3D print all your electronic devices, and pretend you have no idea why they are not working;
Let your cat “help” with your work;
Lesson Five: How to unloop by creating a haze
Dial down contrast and luminosity of your computer screen;
Use this chat app to automatically hide some words behind a haze
https://hazycorner.herokuapp.com/
Lesson Six: How to unloop by unlearning patterns
Patterns can be gleaned from
Fire,
Dreams,
Origami,
Reflection,
Dripping wax,
Numbers, Names,
Shapes of clouds,
Floating tea leaves,
Yarrow stalks, Cards,
Scattered coffee grounds,
Livers of sacrificed animals,
Stones, gems, crystals, runes,
Flight of birds, trails of animals,
Variations in the face and head shapes,
Water, Mountain, Woods, Earthen harmony,
Markings in the ground, sand, earth, or soil,
Astrology, Time of the Day, Month, and Year,
Models, scars, lines inside palms, body marks,
… …
Fortune-telling is the ancient art of anticipation.
It is the practice of gleaning into the future by way of patterns.
A fortune teller is blessed with the power to see in times of change.
Use the chart below to re-steering your future by unlearning patterns from the past.
Fat earlobes show fortune,
Big lips are signs of richness,
Thick eyebrows show prestige,
Round chin indicates a rich entrepreneur,
An open forehead is a sign of intelligence,
Eyes that are pointy in the corners signify risk-aversion,
A round-face for a woman is an indication of the perfect husband__________,
Clear eyes with even white space on either side of the iris indicate a pleasant_____________personality,
A nose with a high bridge is blessed with leadership for men and ~~ lovers ~~ for women.
Lesson Seven: How to unloop by creating a collective voice of synthetic future
Heartbroken by politically divided news from mainstream media? Use AI to collectively create a zine of our own, where Who Said What will become impossible to answer.
