Project Overview
Collabration with Canhe Yang
Who Goes to the New World? is a participatory system art project combining an online platform with a potential installation format.
Using emoji as minimal representations of human identity, the work invites participants to repeatedly decide who should be granted access to a fictional “new world.” Individual decisions accumulate into a shared dataset, gradually producing visible social patterns and hierarchies.
Rather than presenting a predetermined narrative, the project allows a speculative civilization to emerge from the collective choices of its participants.
Concept
The work begins with a simple question:
Who deserves a place in the future?
Participants encounter simplified human representations that retain only a limited set of characteristics, such as gender, race, and age. Within an intentionally extreme scenario, they are repeatedly asked to decide who may board an imagined ark bound for a new world.
Each choice is recorded and contributes to a growing collective database. As participation accumulates, individual judgments become aggregated into statistical structures that increasingly shape the system itself.
The project explores how seemingly personal decisions can become systemic forces when repeated at scale.
System Logic
As more participants contribute, patterns begin to emerge:
- Frequently selected characters gain greater visibility.
- Marginalized characters appear less often or disappear entirely.
- Collective preferences gradually produce a new social order.
The interface transforms from a neutral decision-making tool into a dynamic representation of collective values and exclusions.
Simultaneously, the system generates speculative texts describing the development of this emerging civilization. These narratives are continuously rewritten according to the changing structure of participant choices.
Central Question
Can a process that appears democratic and statistically fair still produce exclusion, inequality, and division?
What kinds of futures emerge when collective bias becomes infrastructure?
Medium
Online Participatory Platform Interactive Installation
项目概述
《谁去新世界？》是一项结合在线参与平台与现场装置形式的系统艺术项目。
作品以 emoji 作为最小化的人类身份标记，邀请参与者不断决定谁有资格进入一个虚构的“新世界”。随着选择的不断累积，个体判断逐渐转化为可见的社会结构与群体偏好。
作品并不预设未来的样貌，而是让一个虚构文明在参与者持续不断的选择中逐渐生成。
概念
作品始于一个简单的问题：
谁有资格进入未来？
参与者面对的是被极度简化的人类形象，仅保留性别、种族、年龄等有限属性。在一个被刻意极端化的情境中，他们被不断要求决定谁能够登上通往“新世界”的方舟。
每一次选择都会被记录，并汇入持续增长的共享数据库。随着参与人数增加，这些个体判断逐渐累积为统计结构，并开始反过来塑造系统本身。
作品关注的是个人判断如何在规模化运作中转变为制度性力量。
系统机制
随着越来越多的参与者加入，系统开始呈现出明显的结构：
- 被频繁选择的角色获得更高的可见性；
- 被忽视的角色逐渐边缘化甚至消失；
- 集体偏好不断生成新的社会秩序。
原本中性的选择界面逐渐转变为一面映照群体价值观与排斥机制的镜子。
与此同时，系统还会根据实时数据生成关于“新世界”的叙事文本，形成一个不断更新的文明档案。这些故事并非预先写定，而是由参与者的选择持续改写。
核心问题
当个体偏见通过统计与多数机制不断累积时，看似公平的决策过程是否仍然会制造排斥与不平等？
当偏见成为基础设施时，我们正在建造怎样的未来？
媒介
在线参与平台 交互装置