Author Archives: Yaqi Hu
#6 From Everyday Media Rituals to an Encounter with AI
James Carey’s ritual view of communication left me great impression when I first learned in undergraduate class. This week, I revisited chapters from his book Communication as Culture, including “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” which connect with my project’s idea. Carey explains how communication creates and maintains shared meanings. He distinguishes this ritual perspective from …
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#5 When an Interaction Becomes a Ritual
In “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework,” Hobson and colleagues (2018) review research on how rituals influence people’s emotions, performance, and social connections. They describe rituals as structured sequences of actions that carry symbolic meaning and include elements without an obvious practical connection to their intended outcome. Their framework distinguishes between …
#4 When a Machine Feels Like Someone
In “Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers,” Nass and Moon (2000) review experiments showing that people apply familiar social rules to computers, even they recognize that computers are not human. These responses include politeness, reciprocity, and judgments based on a computer’s apparent personality or social identity. For example, participants evaluated a computer more positively …
#3 Media Review: Clickclickclick.click and the Magic of Being Watched
I found a website project: Clickclickclick.click (Moniker & VPRO Medialab, 2016), an interactive website with almost no visible content. When you arrive, a plain page shows a single green button. As you move your mouse, scroll, resize the window, or leave the tab, a disembodied voice narrates each action aloud (“The user has moved their …
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#2 Magic Performance and Machinic Rhetoric
In “Machinic Rhetorics and the Influential Movements of Robots,” Miles C. Coleman (2018) introduces the concept of “machinic rhetoric” to describe how machines can act as rhetorical agents rather than simply functioning as neutral tools. One important idea in the article is the “hidden layer” between humans and machines. We can see what a machine …
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#1 Choosing A Form from The Question
For my MA project, I am planning to design an interactive installation that explores the relationship between machines and human ritual. The installation will create a kind of “pseudo-spiritual” space in which a visitor is invited to sit down and interact with a mechanical display. The machine collect physiological signals such as heart rate, heart-rate …