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Group: Anastasia Thambwe, Natalia Kubica, Jiaqi Li
Our concept: building a stalker
Imagine one day you were on your way back home, someone suddenly stopped you. You immediately realized that it was the person who had been stalking you for five years. You had already moved to a new place 1804 km far away, closed all your social media accounts, and cut off connections with old friends. Yet you were still found. What was scarier was that then you found that before that day, the stalker had already been following you going to work and going back home every day for half a year, and had job interviews in the company you worked in and cyberstalked all your colleagues. That's the experience of being stalked: you will see hundreds of new emails every time you open your email inbox; you will receive a message saying 'I like your shirt' immediately when you went outside; and you will receive bloody photos and death threats, to you and your family. This happened to us and could happen to everyone.
When thinking about stalkers, what has come to your mind? A scary-looking person? A psychotic?
No. There is no standard 'stalker look' that you can tell from the first sight.
However, it's so difficult to make people really realize that, because human beings always try to conclude that there are specific features a stalker should have, and make judgments based on those explicit labels such as a certain age range, a certain gender, or some particular type of appearance. Those stereotypes would lead to wrong judgments and reduced vigilance towards potential stalkers around them.
This is the reason why we are doing this project. By attaching the stalker/creepy creatureness to a virtual non-human being, we aim to remove or reduce all those human-like cues that people can reply on in their judgment of "whether it could be a stalker".
Through this project, we want the audience to realize that:
Stalkers can be anyone.
- Stalkers can be cute and adorable, and can also appear to be nice and sweet at the beginning of your interaction.
Stalking can happen everywhere.
- Stalking can happen on your way to school, and can also happen on your Instagram.
Our creature: Augy Hamitic Won
By making this artificial creature and giving it a context in the video, we want to invite the audience to be immersed in this experience of being stalked, ask yourself questions such as what is the time point when you start to feel that something is wrong, and start to think about the behaviors of a stalker.
The creature we created
To maximize the concept of 'stalkers can be anyone', we created the stalker as a digital creature. It has eyes and a mouth like human beings or animals, as a metaphor for secretly watching you (through the eyes and hidden cameras) and trying to express its obsession with you (through the mouth). It has a cute face, because we want to show that stalkers can appear to be cute and innocent. But when it gets mad because it is being ignored or blocked by the prey whom it stalks, its facial expression would become creepy and angry, as to show the dark side of the stalker.
As for its behaviors, the creature will follow the person that it wants to stalk, send messages attempting to attract the person's attention and start a conversation and express its feelings towards the person. When being ignored or rejected, it will continue to express its obsession regardless of whether the person is comfortable or not.
We created this creature by using the Wizard of Oz method, which means people's interaction with our digital creature was operated by unseen humans' control, rather than the creature's natural or automatic reaction. First, we used Vtube studio for face tracking. It could detect and track the presence of the face of one of us, including that person's eye movement and mouth movement. Second, we used Live2D Editor for animating our creature. With a combination of face tracking and animating techniques, we were able to detect real human facial expressions and movement, and imitate the actions to manipulate the creature's facial movements. Therefore, the creature was completely controlled by us. When we needed it to move (body movement), wink (eye movement), or speak/laugh (mouth movement), one of us would hide next to the computer, face the camera and do the corresponding actions. As for the creature's voice, we used a voice changer app and spoke as if the creature was speaking. We also created its Gmail address and the social media accounts for it on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Snapchat. and Discord, and followed our classmates to make the creature more like a MediaTech student.
The experience we created
In this digital age, stalking not only happens in physical space, but also online, especially on social media platforms. This digital way of stalking, known as cyberstalking, was not a rare phenomenon nowadays. People are using social media apps every day, sharing their moods and details about their personal life. You can easily know about their hobbies, family, friends, and even very private information, such as the home address, through their social media, which might cause great danger when it comes to cyberstalking. So, in the experience that we created, the stalking behaviors mainly happened on social media platforms.
In the video, some of the scenes were recorded from the perspective of the creature. We want to let the audience see through the stalker's eyes, and experience how the creature is secretly observing the person's everyday life. We made the artificial creature in such a way that it is able to live in digital devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, because digital devices are everywhere. The creature can stalk that person in all the possible places, secretly watching every moment of the victim's life without being noticed by them. This also means that it is difficult and almost impossible for the victim to escape from being stalked in our current digital era.
By the way, as anyone you might come across in real life, the creature also has a name: Augy Hamitic Won.
By changing the order of the letters in the name, you could see its true face:
"I am watching you" : )
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