Pei Haonan

-INTRO

Who are we in a family? Mom? Dad? Somebody's legal guardian? That sounds great. But children who live in families without these typical roles can have plenty of love as well. Besides conveying responsibility relationship and blood bond, these labelling roles categories families.

If you have ever observed, sometimes people are hurt by this invisible border, especially children.

Families are diversifying, and the proportion of non-nuclear families is gradually increasing. This situation makes it necessary and urgent for us to question the rationality of family categorisation and explore the current identification system's dark side.

My response is an identification mechanism that is different from the legal and kinship status system. Relatively, it emphasises the human difference in natural attributes and the wholeness of all family members' identity, rather than assigning roles by labelling. In the utopia, Yugoo (the device) defines each family member with a short sound note. Sound identities are not labels nor comparable characteristic, which leads to the disappearance of family boundaries. 

-DECISIONS made for the Gallery exhibition : How to turn five strangers into a family?

I didn’t design a form for Yugoo because I believe that it has many possibilities. It can be shaped into a new category of household products, smart plug-ins or software integrated on existing sound equipment like Alexa or Siri. In the future, it even can be everywhere without any form. At this stage of the project, I think a “fine” prototype has no practical meaning, it is a limitation.

This experience requires the audiences to produce long-term footstep sound because only if, with a sufficient amount of sound data collected, Yugoo can identify the sound source as a family member. Due to facility restrictions, I decided to guide audiences to follow a certain route around the device, so I chose a cylindrical booth.

In order to let the audience integrate into the experiencing atmosphere of the Yugoo project as soon as possible, I added some functional props related to the family concept, such as a cylindrical booth, a cake and tableware. The cylinder is shaped like a round dining table, representing equality and sharing. The cake and tableware reflect that Yugoo gives every family member a sound identity that belongs to the same sweet chord, emphasizing the sense of wholeness while weakening the specific identity positioning and differentiation.

What Yugoo project opposes is the monopoly of using legal identity and kinship identity to define family members. So I decided to choose five strangers to experience my device. Usually, the audiences of the exhibition are strangers to each other. I just took advantage of this fact. I regarded this easy and reasonable decision as a speculative expression method.

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