Receipts
A multimodal interface that receives, anonymizes, archives, and performs testimonies to anti-Asian aggression in public space. Viewable on The Bentway site from October 16 – November 11, 2020.
“In addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, we are experiencing parallel shadow pandemics of racial discrimination and violence, housing precarity and homelessness, and negative effects of isolation. These occurrences disproportionately affect our vulnerable communities. For example, Asian diasporic communities have seen troubling intensifications of racism that have had negative impacts on personal safety.
Receipts is a multimodal interface that receives (via voice, video, and/or text), anonymizes, archives, and performs (on the web and in public) the testimony of people that have experienced or witnessed anti-Asian aggression in public spaces.
At its core, this project is concerned with addressing safety in public space by focusing on the social and technical aspects of recording and publicizing testimony. We hope to build on this prototype in order to develop a more robust and flexible tool that can be modified and employed by equity-seeking groups to influence political decision-making.”
— Public Visualization Studio
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Public Visualization Studio
Public Visualization Studio (PVS) is a design collective whose members are designers, artists, creative technologists, and researchers. The collective creates projects as a means to pursue inquiries into the political and conceptual aspects of interaction, space, and media. Its members attempt to investigate how specific technologies of vision, communication, and gesture support our experiences in participatory spaces. Members of the collective have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have worked in a variety of areas including public projection, media architecture, locative media, video installation, exhibition design, interaction, communication design, and media scholarship. PVS works in collaboration with the Public Visualization Lab (PVL), a university-based lab in Toronto.
Lilian Leung is a Toronto-based designer and community-based researcher originally from Vancouver, BC. Their work explores evolving methods of placemaking and placekeeping in virtual reality using trans- and post-media documentary practices. Their work attempts to explore the acts of archiving, diaspora identity, and the boundaries between memory and history.
Project team: Dave Colangelo, Patricio Dávila, and Immony Mèn in collaboration with Lilian Leung.