Blinking 2.0

This is an ongoing performance project, which is based on the structure of Blinking 1.0.

Sleepy Eyes Project:

I am planning to create a series of networked night performances, which propose a new type of loneliness innovated by social media. The crazy development of technology provides us an easier, faster, more intimate connection with virtual community. However, it might also create the obsessiveness of bonding with social media. I spent most of my bedtime on aimlessly checking twitter and Facebook. This is such a pathetic and lonely image comparing with childhood bedtime that I fell asleep while listening a story told by my mother! I am enthusiastic about making this project as a rebellion to indicate and challenge this social-media-dependent habitual bedtime behavior.

The performances will take place in my bedroom. Every night I will perform a 15mins long meditational sleeping exercise: laying on my bed, looking up at the blank ceiling and slowly blink eyes until I falling asleep. This “minimalism” performance will require me to only concentrate on the slowness of my eyes’ blinks while I am staring at the blank ceiling, which would shift my mind to a calm and self-reflecting state. At meanwhile, my eyes’ blinks will also generate tweets by wearing a pair of networked conductive eyelashes as my sleeping accessory. The conductive eyelash will detect every time of my eyes’ blinks. Through a Bluetooth chip and a programed application, the computer will wirelessly receive the signal generated by each blink and compose a new tweet. Each performance will end when I fell asleep. The last eye blink will generate a tweet: “Finally I fell asleep.” The blinks that I performed every night will accumulate tweets as if I am writing my bedtime diary on twitter, but with my eye-blinks instead of hands.

Each tweet will be preprogrammed through Processing (a computer application).

Examples:

No.1 eye blink asked: “how did you sleep last night?” Someone answered: “ I fell asleep at…”

No.2 eye blink asked: “how did you sleep last night?” Someone answered: “ I fell asleep at…”

No.3 eye blink asked: “how did you sleep last night?” Someone answered: “ I fell asleep at…”

...

The blue part of the tweet tracks and accounts the movements of my eyes and function as a recorder. The red part of tweet comes from other people’s tweets which have the key words of “I fell asleep at”. Twitter has a build-in application that allows me to re-tweet other’s tweets and mix with my own tweets. Thus I can create an imaginary conversation between others’ and mine tweets, which renders the virtual atmosphere of having a bedtime conversation with strangers. Through my nightly performances, the twitter account will accumulate and collect tones of fictional sleeping dialogues. Eventually, this bedtime twitter should be read as a unified sleeping diary as well as a monologue which expresses the obscure feeling of loneliness generated by the time-based performance structure in parallel with twitter’s mechanism.

The left image is the original tweets that people posted.

The right image is the reprogrammed tweets generated by my eyes’ blinks which will be the content of the bedtime twitter.