The 9th K.T. Creativity Award – Interactive Technology Art

Yu-Chun Chen
The Cage

Humans pass trivial task alerts on to alarm clocks in order to expand the memory and time management ability that the human body cannot bear. But after repeated use and adaption for a long time, ringtones will be strongly connected with events such as incoming ringtones.
Heinrich Popitz, a German philosophical anthropologist, put forward a phenomenon that humans are gradually mechanized. The development of machine originates from human’s natural actions, and Popitz called this process as artifact. It is thus clear that people’s initiative and right to use technological objects will gradually lose, and humans will become passive, part-like objects in the end. The strong link between perception and reflection results in uncontrollable conditioned reflexes on the human body, i.e. the reflexes of this phenomenon of mechanized humanity.
In “The Cage,” the intense sounds and visual impressions will pull out visitors’ deep mental statuses extended from the feelings toward alarm clocks. The regular weak sounds from the clock hands pull out the sense of anxiety deeply inside the hearts, while the ringtones from different positions affect all the sense organs.