Cyan Bae (배채연) is a graphic designer and researcher based in The Hague with a focus on socio-political discourses. Her recent works revolve around the topics of queering archaeology, Orientalist imagery, and the feminization of artificial intelligence. pingping.press
GRADUATION PROJECT
The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 is disproportionately destructive to communities that were already marginalized in pre-Coronavirus societies, weaved with racialization, sexism, homo- and transphobia. The pandemic state of alert has made evident once more the societal fragmentation and discrimination systematically sustained for decades.
Cyan Bae presents a series of three video letters sent from The Hague to her sister in Seoul amid isolation. The autofictional film juxtaposes the Korean and Dutch contexts of contact tracing, biopolitics and crowd control, which intensifies the stigmatization and violence against the queer communities and people of Asian descent, and how these intersect by migration and distancing. While yearning for the Post-Corona in the New Normal, should we wish the normal back?
Dear Chaemin is also released online for the duration of the graduation show 10-13 September at dearchaemin.online
THESIS
The Intimate Voice: Questions for the Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant, are increasingly integrated into domestic and industrial environments with the advancement of artificial intelligence(AI). The ubiquitous internet connectivity of physical devices is often humanized, predominantly projecting female-sounding voices.
In this paper, I examine the voice assistant as a reenactment of the vocal ideal through the performance of a white able-bodied native-English speaking by the feminized persona. The feminization of conversational agents reinforces the normative gender conceptualization, building onto the gendered history of computing and affective labor. Moreover, the un/visualized aspects of conversational agents contribute to the depoliticization of the racialized history and practice of servitude. Finally, a new digital voice prototype ‘Q’ is studied drawing from surveillance studies, applied linguistics, and transfeminist theories.