Jiayi Young Reflection

I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful artist talk in the Lawrence University Wriston Gallery this past week conducted by the esteemed Jiayi Young: A multi-disciplinary new-media artist, associate professor of design at the University of California, Davis, and to top it all off... a Lawrence University Graduate herself. She walked around the gallery which she reported was displaying her work at about a fifth of its usual scale which should be taken into account. The first piece she introduced titled "What does the Bot say to the Human" quantifies the frequency of non human interaction on websites like twitter and visualizes it as fluorescent green liquid dripping through mechanically stoppered tubes into a system of small lights. The movement of the lights begins almost natural but slowly becomes corrupted and speratic. I believe the word she chose was "Irritated" which felt super congruent to what I was watching. Personally I found myself fascinated at the work behind the scenes that didn't come to my attention until after I had seen her work when she talked about her process. The research she was trying to conduct on the trends of twitter (now X) was locked behind a serious accessability barrier for her. It wasn't really easy for the average joe to tabulate data about such specific topics as she was interested from twitter without having computer science knowledge to make a tool for yourself. At first, she collaborated with a data scientist friend, but eventually she worked with a team of specialists to create a proprietary tool for the conduction of one's own research into twitter trends and search terms over long periods of time. With this new software tool, she was able to generate timelines with frequencies of tweets surrounding important disinformation events, most of which had lots of news coverage related to them. With this data, she printed out the graphs and presented them hung down from a wall and around drying racks. This not only was effective for displaying such large timelines, but also artistically emphasised and framed the magnitude and reality of the prepetuation online of such disinformation. Not only did she stop at making the software for her own use, she had a neat display with two monitors set up with a more userfriendly version of her software for people to try out. She told us her end goal was to make the tool accessible for all people by either having it as part of a collection of similar open source tools, or having it distributed to public institutions like libraries to be accessible for all. Overall, I found her bridging of the gap between nebulous ideas and blips in the online zeitgheist into tangible scale to be confronted by as very effective! I loved how it felt to see the bots illustrated mechanically as they sullyied the somewhat human presence on the internet. Have any of you heard about the dead internet theory? some people say that the speed at which bots have been introduced to our forums and social media sites, its likely a version of reality where the internet is exclusively bots arguing with eachother unbeknownst to either of them. I feel like what may feel like an obvious 95% human internet and 5% bot internet that it feels we are on could verywell be something more like a 60% bot 40% human internet with the scale and sophistication of some things I've seen recently. Its great when an artist can get you thinking about stuff like this so I am so glad I was able to attend Jiayi Young's talk.