Author: Xiyue Zhang

The project I chose to copy is a poster called We Are Human Beings! by Silvio Lorusso. In his perspective, machines act as a “dehumanizing” force. They are used as a tool for control in a system run by technology.

The text on this poster comes from a famous speech by Mario Savio. He gave this speech in 1964 during the “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley. Here is the text:

At that time, protesters were fighting against early data storage devices, which were computers and ‘punch cards’. To protest, they punched holes into cardboard to create letter shapes that machines couldn’t recognize. This was their way of fighting back.​

More than forty years later, CAPTCHAs were developed. These are common tools used to tell humans and robots apart. They are made of distorted letters and symbols generated by computers. When we log into websites, we have to identify these messy letters to solve a problem that machines can’t handle. By doing this, we actually help the computer learn. The machine “digests” the characters we identify and uses them to train its own models.

For the protesters in the 60s, punching holes was a symbol of being treated like a machine. So, turning those holes back into symbols that only humans could read was a kind of “revenge.”


But CAPTCHAs are different. They serve both as a way to access websites and as a means for machines to judge us. At this moment, machines have become the arbiters of whether our humanity is real. We establish a connection with them by performing the actions they demand, solely to verify our identity.

This poster uses the digital technology behind the CAPTCHA algorithm as a tool for “Conditional Design.” It connects two very different attitudes. In the 60s, students broke the system’s rules to fight for freedom. Today, we have to follow the machine’s rules to prove we are free.


This poster layers these two logics together, using machine-generated distorted letterforms to write an anti-machine manifesto. It explores those moments of tension and divergence between humans and machines within graphic design in the era of computer algorithms.

I take Exercises in Style as a methodological perspective, employing the ‘notation’ and ‘retrograde’ writing styles (Queneau 1958, pp. 19, 25) to re-present passages from Invisible Cities, thereby exploring how different writing styles instigate changes in perception and a reconstruction of logic (Calvino 2010, p. 29).

Based on this, I treat writing as a medium for constructing cognitive forms through linguistic structures. When text passes through these stylized ‘filters’, content shifts from mere transmission to active construction. In other words, the mode of writing determines not only how content is expressed, but more crucially, how it is perceived.

Here is my re-present experiment:

Notation

Kublai Khan noticed that Marco Polo’s descriptions of cities were remarkably similar, as if he were merely rearranging elements rather than actually traveling. So whenever Marco Polo began describing a city, Kublai Khan would mentally dismantle it piece by piece, then swap, shift, and invert its elements, reassembling them in new configurations.

As Marco Polo continued recounting his travels, Kublai Khan stopped listening and interrupted him. He ordered that he himself would now describe the city, demanding only that Marco Polo confirm whether these cities existed. Kublai Khan described a city on stairs, set on a half-moon bay, where hot winds are constantly blowing. It possessed many wonders: a glass pool as tall as a cathedral, where swallow fish glided; a palm tree whose leaves produced harp-like sounds when the wind blew; and a square encircling a horseshoe-shaped marble table laden with food and drink, all carved from marble.

Marco Polo pointed out that Kublai Khan had drifted off, and this was precisely the city he had just been describing.

Retrograde

‘Sire, your mind has been wandering.’ Marco Polo said, ‘This is precisely the city I was telling you about when you interrupted me.’ 

Just moments ago, Kublai Khan interrupted Marco Polo’s narration to describe the city he envisioned. This is a city built upon stairs, set in a half-moon bay, where hot winds blow continuously. The city featured a glass pool as tall as a cathedral, where people could watch swallow fish glide through the water; palm trees whose leaves produced harp-like sounds when stirred by the wind; and a square surrounding a horseshoe-shaped marble table laden with food and drink carved from marble.

Before this, Kublai Khan interrupted Marco Polo’s travel account. He described the characteristics of his own city, while Marco Polo was only required to confirm whether this imagined city actually existed. This scene unfolded as Kublai Khan mentally deconstructed and reassembled elements from each city, reconstructing them in entirely new ways. 

From the very beginning of their conversation, Kublai Khan had already sensed that the cities Marco Polo described were so alike, as if he were merely changing the combination of their elements, without ever needing to travel.

Reference:

Calvino, I. (2010) Invisible Cities. London: Vintage Digital.

Queneau, R. (1958) Exercises in Style. London: John Calder.

I take ‘Body Writing’ as the starting point of my moving image, trying to make the skin a medium that carries cultural memory and social discipline.

In my country, there is a saying that one ‘must not defile the body since it is given to us by our parents.’

Although this notion is not enforced in contemporary society, and individuals have the right to modify their bodies through practices like tattoos and piercings, it remains deeply rooted in the collective unconscious as a form of body politics, subtly disciplining people.

Within this context, I use eyeliner and eyeshadow to paint upon skin, leaving symbols on the body’s surface that can be read and erased. I seek to find the boundary between what is “permitted” and what is “forbidden,” exploring the floating state between traditional ethics and contemporary culture.

Through photography and hand drawing, I document the generation and fading of these marks, treating them as an ongoing dialogue between the body and culture, the visible and invisible, the individual and the normative, turning my body into a “readable” field.

Slide 1
The material I selected is a ‘sewable, co-creative, wearable’ magazine: Booklook issue 2 Shirt. It explores DIY practices within the fashion field.

The publication examines how DIY magazines focused on sewing, crocheting, and pattern-making influence consumer behavior, highlighting how DIY practices become tools to transform mainstream narratives and create change.​

Slide 2
Booklook emphasizes: Wearing is Publishing is Reading.
The book contains stitch patterns and offers English, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish versions. This allows readers to use the patterns to remake their ‘Booklook Shirt.’​

Slide 3
I transfer text from the surface of books onto the body, so that everyone can become a creator, ‘wearing’ words on their skin, using the body as a way and method of communication. This responds to the call of the original concept: Wearing is Publishing is Reading.

The original content transforms from ‘being read’ into ‘a practice of collective performance,’ where meaning is continuously generated and re-arranged through creation and interaction.

Slide 6
I use Hybridizing to remake multi-national stitch styles into a ‘special crochet version,’ re-arranging crochet into a cultural language. This strengthens the shirt’s role as a visual declaration.

Within diverse cultural contexts, these visual declarations create different interpretations, thus further dissolving the boundaries between designer and audience.

Slide 7
I changed the magazine’s folding structure and layout, separating text and images onto different pages. Audience must fold and stitched the magazine first — only then do these elements become readable content.

Audience can try different folding ways, each ways aligns different pages and produces different sequences of text or images, placing interpretive control in the audience hands.

The book I cite is The Order of Things (Foucault, 1970), wherein Foucault elaborates upon the instability of knowledge within his discourse. Take, for instance, the example cited in the Preface of Borges’ description of ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia,’ the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Employing taxonomy, it classifies animals as: (a) belonging to the Emperor…… (n) those that from a distance resemble flies’ (Borges, 1999, p. 231). Within this taxonomic framework, both genuinely existing animals and purely imaginary entities coexist.

Foucault observes that the true grotesque quality in Borges’ enumeration lies not merely in the absurd juxtaposition of entries, but in the emptying of the shared ‘site’ that bears their juxtaposition: those creatures ‘(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’ can only meet within the lines of the page. That is to say, they can only be juxtaposed within language’s ‘non-place’.

Language can indeed enumerate them, but only within an unthinkable space. The self-referential catalogue entry (h) included in the present classification exposes the paradox inherent in this Category: if all animals can be classified within this table, then the table itself must be classified within itself. Where, then, does it exist? This method of classification enumerates these peculiar categories in a ‘catalogue-like’ form, evoking an arbitrary yet omnipresent framework of knowledge that renders all animals as existing within this classification. This approach blurs the boundaries of cataloguing, dissolving the spatial foundation that underpins the juxtaposition of entities. Within this context, the alphabetical sequence (a)……(n) becomes the sole visible clue, exposing the arbitrariness of this order and rendering the enumeration’s collective coherence untenable.

Thus, employing the cataloguing method of Inventory, I designed a list that ‘translates’ the original text into a set of ‘methodological terms’. Using the original’s cataloguing approach, I map the characteristics and limitations of writing as a creative mode. Establishing a visible order facilitates retrieval and comparison, fabricating an ‘orderly fact’ valid solely within the textual space. This response to Foucault’s assertion in the preface: order is written into being.

Reference:

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications.

Borges, J. L. (1999) Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by E. Weinberger. Translated by E. Allen, S. J. Levine & E. Weinberger. London: Penguin Books.

On the cover, I add the word ‘men’ into the title ‘What Women Want to Know’ and place it over the original words, quietly pointing to ‘What Men Want Women to Know.’

I use fairy tales to catalogue ‘What Women Want to Know.’ Both use careful language to create a so-called ‘right atmosphere,’ selling a dream that slowly shapes how women see the world. This keeps sending new waves of worry toward women – through old social ideas and through new, market – driven ‘selling points.’ As a result, women’s own agency is weakened, and they are turned into people to be taught, judged, and ‘improved.’

On the next spread, I compare five fairy tales with five categories from ‘What Women Want to Know.’ Snow White is compared with beauty, Sleeping Beauty is compared with health, Bluebeard is compared with household, Hansel and Gretel is compared with cooking, and Cinderella is compared with cleaning.

Drawing on what these texts share, the left page places similar lines and slogans side by side in the same context, while the right page lists the book details so readers can look them up easily. For example, in the compared of Sleeping Beauty with health, the princess is ‘awakened,’ and the power to restore her health is handed over to the prince.

In the comparing of Cinderella with cleaning, Cinderella’s forced labour is shown next to advertisement that use housework to check whether someone is a ‘proper housewife,’ which turns anxiety into something personal and moral.

With this layout, I make the harm in the language visible and present it in a more direct, plain way.

Slide 1

The set I selected is ‘What Women Want To Know’, sourced from the Harvard Digital Collections.

This is a catalogue focusing on ‘advertising brochures aimed at women’, reflecting the cultural and consumer expectations of society about women’s areas of interest and lifestyle areas from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It is organised around five categories: Cooking, Household Appliances, Cleaning, Health, and Beauty, with 211 items in total.

Slide 2

They stem from the same medium and purpose. The large number of them are advertisements or promotional brochures that target women’s household and personal care needs with a mixed message of ‘guidance, science education, and product recommendations.’

Slide 3

Across different specialized fields, text and image balance show distinct tendencies. Cooking sections favor lengthy recipe texts with a few ingredient illustrations.

Slide 4

Household Appliances and Cleaning balance situational graphics, flowcharts, and text about half and half.

Slide 5

While Health and Beauty feature a lighter text with tips, and flowcharts or product descriptions take up more space.

Slide 6

They combine to create a consumer grammar chain related to ‘household-body-technology.’ Cooking is based on Household Appliances, while Cleaning, Health, and Beauty are interconnected. This interplay makes each component less independent, forming a framework of chained consumption narratives.

Slide 7

This set contains a large number of consistent rhetorical elements, such as ‘guide to… / ology / Dr. tone / for ladies’, which are frequently used to confer credibility. Moreover, they originate from the same institutional context: their provenance traces back to the collection series of the Schlesinger Library.

The original spread through low-cost outlets, by mail, in-store distribution, and magazine inserts. Today, it serves researchers as part of the Harvard Library collection.

Slide 8 （cataloguing 1）

I used (Re)contextualising to place this Set within the context of ‘anxiety-driven information search’: I categorised it according to the cues users seek when in states of uncertainty and anxiety (such as Odour / Drudgery / Germs / Pain / Ageing). Translating the original set’s promise structure into search entry points aligned with audience needs, establishing a user-centric catalogue.

Slide 9 （cataloguing 2）

I saw the ‘record ID’ label within the original set, so I looked into its coding principle. This is a Persistent Internal Identifier called ‘MMS ID’ used by Harvard Library, representing the time of data entry. I then used Sequencing to contrast human archival logic with machine archival logic, exploring the tension arising from the logical shift between the ‘original order’ in archival science and the ‘access order’ of digital platforms.

Slide 11 （cataloguing 3）

And I used Framing to separate sets into Company / Pub. House / Independent publisher, focusing on the ‘’sources of words’’. Readers can first see who is speaking and who is participating in this field of voice. This allows readers to understand the visual and content leanings of the materials through the lens of ‘publishing identity’.

As a foreign observer, my research focuses on an M&S Foodhall located between Finsbury Park Station and the UAL student residence Sketch House, examining how non-place and place coexist and overlap in this space. Taking M&S as a site that enables ‘local connections,’ I look at how it generates a pull between a fleeting sense of temporariness and a subtle sense of belonging, and use this to reflect on the relations between circulation and dwelling in the contemporary city.

I draw upon French anthropologist Marc Augé’s theory, which defines non-places as spaces traversed by people yet offering little genuine belonging (Augé, 1995). But Augé does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: places still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. This insight provides a crucial framework for understanding M&S, where space, between standardisation and emotionalisation, is not a binary exclusion but a continuous permeation and reassembly.

The M&S food hall exemplifies this blurred boundary. Its spatial layout and product display adhere to the logic of globalised retail systems, shaping the consumer experience through fluidity and anonymity. Yet for local residents, it simultaneously serves as a repository of everyday memories and a social nexus. When diverse flavours on the shelves bring people, goods, and cultural imagery together under one roof; in fulfilling multiple needs, the environment itself becomes an imagined displacement. Within this liminal space, the supermarket transforms into a site of localisation practices within a non-place, bearing micro-narratives of migration, difference, and belonging. Thus, the supermarket generates differentiated meanings through varying perspectives. For commuters, it serves as a rapid resupply station; For residents of the surrounding neighbourhood, the regular comings and goings, the banter with shop assistants, and the repetitive walking routes gradually form a perceptible ‘micro-geography’, a small-scale society. For international students like myself, however, recognition and misplacement coexist: the familiar foods are unfamiliar versions adapted to the local context. This oscillation prompts a repositioning of my own place and a learning of local rules. This layering of multiple perspectives forms a ‘narratable localisation’.

Drawing inspiration from Perec’s advocacy for rediscovering the everyday through writing (Perec, 1997), and Mattern’s discussion of using tools to intervene and reconfigure perceptions of the urban landscape (Mattern, 2013), I regard writing and visual practice as means to embody locality. Accordingly, I employ notetaking, diagramming, and photography to document and remake commodities, transforming them from everyday consumer items into visual carriers of cross-cultural narratives. This compels us to respond to the dislocation of personal rhythms, initiating spatial practices from local experience and transforming M&S Foodhall into a place that can be perceived, narrated, and continuously generate meaning. Through this process of inscription, it acquires a public dimension that is open to discussion, critique, and extension.

References:

Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London / New York: Verso.

Mattern, S. (2013) Infrastructural Tourism. Places Journal, July. Available at: https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/ (Accessed: 14 October 2025).

Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by J. Sturrock. London: Penguin Books.

Slide 1
During these past few days of research, I walked from my accommodation to the supermarket many times. I started to realise that both the spaces I passed through on the way, and the supermarket itself, are in a kind of non-place state for me.
M&S is a global and modernised space, but it lacks a sense of history, relationships, and identity. It’s a functional space, designed for “passing through” rather than “staying” or “belonging.”
I began to wonder whether it can only exist as a place of consumption, or if it might also create some kind of connection with the world during people’s brief visits — or maybe miss that chance entirely. So this week, I explored the non-place characteristics of M&S.

Slide 2
I drew on the ideas of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. He defines non-places as spaces where people pass through but never truly belong — such as airports, train stations, or motorways.
These spaces are mainly about circulation and consumption. People take part actively, but they stay anonymous, passing by one another without real connection.
Supermarkets are a typical example. Their spatial organisation strongly shapes how people move, perceive, and relate to each other.
My research aims to use visual and spatial analysis to reveal how these seemingly neutral spaces quietly influence our social behaviour and cultural identity.

Slide 3
The artist Christian Jankowski explored this shift in his work The Hunt (1992). He entered a supermarket with a bow and arrow, turning grocery shopping into a kind of ritualised hunting. I was fascinated by this sense of disconnection.

For me, comparing the natural hunting ground and the modern supermarket is very interesting. A natural hunting ground is a place — shaped by hunting traditions, rituals, the identity of hunter communities, human–nature relationships, and specific geography. It’s embedded in history, culture, and personal memory.
Modern supermarkets, in contrast, offer endless products but erase the traces behind them. Consumers seem to enjoy “freedom of choice,” but in fact the options are already filtered by the market, and marketing strategies create a false sense of belonging.

Slide 4
This is where the contradiction appears. On one hand, M&S operates as a non-place. On the other hand, it creates pseudo place-making through origin labels and marketing stories — for example, “spring water from Scotland” or “from trusted British farms.”
These narratives turn geography into a commodity, reducing place identity to a marketing tool. It becomes a commodified memory, something sold as a symbol.
So in the same space, non-place and pseudo place-making coexist — and sometimes even clash.

Slide 5
I then recorded my movements in the supermarket again. Unlike last week, this time I used dynamic routes to track both myself and other customers.
Customers are constantly moving, but I froze their actions into static symbols. This method became a way to visualise and metaphorically express the patterns of non-place — anonymity, standardisation, and repetition.

Slide 6
In the next week, I will explore who the audience of this topic might be. I plan to invite other people to collaborate with me and build a kind of non-place archive, collecting their perspectives and emotional experiences.
Through this, I want to understand how these everyday non-places shape our social imagination.