Om
We are quickly approaching a world where the digital space is as omnipresent as air. Though we still have physical interfaces, they seem to be the final barrier to be broken before we achieve complete integration with our devices. Perhaps because of our dependence on outside stimulation and material things, we are finding that we have less and less time to look inside ourselves. Our attention is being hijacked, and according to Jinyu Chen, it’s something we should take back.
Meet Jinyu
Jinyu Chen is an artist and designer from China with a background in industrial design. Germany seemed like a great prospect for her skills, and after a seemingly magical opportunity to take a German language course, Jinyu decided to follow the signs and head to Berlin.
One of the main differences in culture she found was that in her Chinese university, she rarely interacted with her classmates and teachers. There was a lack of connection with her peers there, so she welcomed the openness of the AULA Future Lab—the Lab is not about getting a good grade, rather its goal is to explore one’s deepest interests with the tool of speculative design and art-based research.
Through AULA, Jinyu says that she realised that the meaning of design is not as tied to the form of the piece as she once thought, but it’s more about the concept behind it.
Concept
Adopting this “concept-first” approach, Jinyu began researching and took an immediate interest in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Superintelligent AI, and how we might cohabitate with it in the future. What if AI truly becomes integrated in our lives and bodies and we forget what reality is?
Although we interact with our devices now on a daily basis, they are not yet fully integrated into our physical bodies. The connection is more emotional and abstract for now, but one day it could be much more prominent. This possibility is not far off, and with the invention of new technologies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a “virtual assistant” directly embedded in the brain, Jinyu’s speculative future seems much less speculation than reality.
“It could eventually be a luxury to have a space that only belongs to us.“
Beginnings
Jinyu imagines that if we lived in a hybrid reality curated with our wants and needs by machines, we might need a reminder of what it means to be human. “It could eventually be a luxury to have a space that only belongs to us.”
The dangers of not having such a space in Jinyu’s opinion, is losing the ability “to architect our inside”; to be exactly the person you genuinely want to be. Most of the industry is misleading–they create the perfect illusion by tapping into our most intrinsic desires. Our problems actually begin from the inside, and most often our personal data only tells a portion of the real story from an external point of view.
Imagine an AI informing you that you are cold based on your biometric data it sources from your watch. In an attempt to regulate your temperature, it automatically turns up the heat in your house. Although this service seems convenient, it removes the space where we can pause and make a conscious decision. Though it may seem trivial, the simple privilege of feeling cold and deciding for ourselves to turn up the heat, could one day be missed.
Project
Jinyu has invented a way to reclaim that space. “Om” is a fictional company which offers the service of solitude via a sphere-shaped helmet. This helmet is meant to create a pause in a chaotic world, and provides space for mindful meditation amongst an intrusive and stimulating world.
Upon entering the installation, the viewer is immediately immersed in colorful strings hanging from the ceiling. The weight to those strings forces you to use your hands to push them away, representing the overstimulation that we might encounter through our devices and through advertisements. Among the colors are the black, sphere-shaped voids meant to block out her metaphor of light.
These “black holes” are Jinyu’s Om helmets; the only escape from the intrusive strings in the outside world. The helmets engulf the head of its user, who experiences an immediate sense of quiet. A voice is activated, explaining that all outside AI is not able to function here. It is a safe space.
The antidote to overstimulation is quiet time with ourselves—a skill the artist wants us to nourish.
Today, there exist more low-tech services such as yoga and meditation. But we often only do these exercises at certain points in the day. Perhaps that’s not enough. Om is an investigation into one potential way we might integrate mindfulness throughout the day, and reconnect to our authentic selves.
We all need space and time with ourselves. What Jinyu wants to emphasize is to remember that we still have the choice to do what we want. But as this connection to the virtual world increases, we are in danger of losing the connection to our inner self. The power of having a “pause” before a decision, is one of those things that make us human. Because it’s within that space that we humans make the decisions which add up to our lives.
