Can You Tear for Me?
→Supassing r=a(1-sinθ), Qimu Space, 2018
Here is my post:
Hi, I had a bad day and I want to collect photos of people “tearing” for me.
Can you submit a photo\selfie of you “tearing”?
You don’t have to show your whole face in the picture and you don’t have to cry.
Please make sure it is the picture of yourself not from the Internet.
30 photos have been collected on the date of May 19th.
- The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. One can create a HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks) and ask workers to complete the tasks for a monetary payment.
When Is The Last Time You Cried?
Online Event
2019
artificial tear, glass, wood (online event launched in 2019 tother with VISION)
Tears are secretions, symptoms and signs. We cry out of pain or joy, love and loss, sometimes for an onion. It rolls down the cheeks, leaving eyes red and trails of stains. Regardless the causes, tear generates from three layers in the tear film:
Lipid, aqueous and mucins.
I tried to understand these layers of sadness, while crying every day for a month in 2015. I brought bottles of tear to laboratories and analyzed what inside. It was dried out, burnt, reacted with chemicals and turned into different colors. I couldn’t tell which was more fatiguing, crying it out or breaking it down.
After the month, I got my recipe:
Water: 97.56% Protein: 7905.9ug/ml PH: 7.62 Glucose: 0 mg/ml Na+ : 151.6mM K+ : 19.5mM
I made a big jar of my tear by mixing all the chemicals accordingly and an installation pumping the tear out. inviting people to touch it.
I wondered, would I feel the touch on my cheeks?
A visitor in the exhibition once asked me, are you sad?
I figured, we might feel the same.
I want to invite you to take a bottle my tear and the rules are simple:
Send me a 30-second long video of yourself tearing down in exchange for one bottle of the artificial tear I mixed. I have thirty bottles.
Here is my email: tearbottles@voidvision.com
Waiting for you.
Xin Liu
Tear Set
→Supassing r=a(1-sinθ), Qimu Space, 2018
The artificial tear is made of purified water, salt, protein (lactoferrin and lysozyme), carboxymethyl cellulose and sugar. It mirrors the concentration of the artist’s biological tear according to a series of chemical analyses*. Sharing the materiality of emotion production, the tear is a hybrid of elaborated sentiments and indifferent mass-production. It weaves materiality and narratives into a social experiment where the simulation, expression and records of emotion become the source of affection.
*Including ICP-MS, BCA protein assay, micro-camera and plasmonic interferometry.
2015
Artificial tear: purified water, salt, protein (lactoferrin and lysozyme), carboxymethyl cellulose and sugar. Wood, glass, electronics, pumps.
Technical Documentation
Human tear film, composed of the lipid, aqueous and mucin layers produces tears. Collaborating intensely with chemists in Brown University, the project carried on four experiments to test the concentrations of water mass, glucose, protein, K+ and Na+ ions in the artist’s emotional tears.
Credits
Chemists: Researcher Guozhu Zhu, Professor Domenico Pacifici, Brown University
Industrial Designer: Sean Hongxin Zhang
Wood Structure Fabrication: Shanghai Dperot Furniture Co., Ltd
Glass Making: Niels Cosman
Thanks to
Kelly Dobson
Zhang Ga
Lisa Morgan
Pattie Maes
Gershon Dublon
Cho-Tao Huang
Chemists: Researcher Guozhu Zhu, Professor Domenico Pacifici, Brown University
Industrial Designer: Sean Hongxin Zhang
Wood Structure Fabrication: Shanghai Dperot Furniture Co., Ltd
Glass Making: Niels Cosman
Thanks to
Kelly Dobson
Zhang Ga
Lisa Morgan
Pattie Maes
Gershon Dublon
Cho-Tao Huang