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Visual Communication (MA)

Lin Lyu

My Cloud Lab

Lin Lyu (b.2001) is a graphic designer who grew up in a design household in China. With her father working in the architecture industry, she was influenced by his choice of environmental design and completed her undergraduate degree in China. There she laid the foundation for environmental design and developed a passion for graphic design during one of those serendipitous cross-disciplinary collaborative projects. 

After her undergraduate education, she pursued a systematic study of graphic design in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art and developed her further interests in network censorship. Now she is experimenting with diverse tools to facilitate these works.

Chinese censorship

At first, I didn’t agree or comprehend the phrase “China is the world’s biggest prison for netizens” until I had lived and studied in another country for a long time. My perception was completely changed forever. 

After breaking away from the Chinese government’s Internet blockade, I began to think about what is at issue with this Internet censorship and how to transmit these concerns to society in light of my personal experience.

In my recent work, I have been trying to study this extreme Chinese censorship, initially as a bystander documenting the dystopian literature derived from online censorship, to now, attempting to respond to this censorship with a more critical voice. My position has also changed from that of a reporter to that of a critic.

Besides my individual research, can also demonstrate my model of practice, i.e. collaborative activities, workshops, and open-ended conversations.









A speculative design
A fictional mobile app – Interface display, a data cloud
A speculative design
Interface display, a fictional cloud
A lab report
Poster display – A lab report
A speculative design
A guidebook – A guidebook for the mobile game
A speculative design
A fresh data cloud – Inside display, p05-06
A speculative design
Toxic ingredient, pornography – Inside display, p23-24
A speculative design
Toxic ingredient, violence – Inside display, p25-26
A speculative design
Toxic ingredient, anti-social – Inside display, p27-32
A speculative design
Toxic ingredient, other – Inside display, p29-30
A critical exhibition
A fictional laboratory – Draft, a surreal and absurd space
A critical exhibition
A fictional laboratory – A surreal and absurd space, 3D modeling
A critical exhibition
A fictional laboratory – A surreal and absurd space, 3D modeling

MY CLOUD LAB

This work is a speculative design that attempts to critique Chinese censorship, experimenting with multiple media. In this work, I attempt to use an abnormal experiment to critique the absurdity of China’s extreme censorship. “My Cloud” is a fictional cloud that feeds on sensitive data. The fictional species ‘My Cloud’ is a product of imagination. If this fictional cloud really existed in a three-dimensional world, what would its cellular structure look like?

This work forcibly uses scientific experiments to examine a fictional cloud that does not exist in the real world which construct a surreal and absurd space to satirize the absurdity of Chinese censorship. 

Under Neck, digital publishing
A risky Chinese character, xiong – Inside display, a5, chapter 1, p5-6
exual organ
A default rule
A default rule – Inside display, chapter 2, p17-18
Circumvention
Circumvention
A circumvention, metaphor – Inside display, chapter 3, p17-18
Circumvention
A circumvention, metaphor – Inside display, chapter 3, p19-20
Circumvention
A circumvention, Imagery – Inside display, chapter 3, p15-16
Circumvention
A circumvention, satire – Inside display, p31-32
Circumvention
A circumvention, code – Inside display, p25-28

UNDER NECK

This project is about AI censorship and online erotica (Romantic fiction) in China. I’m taking Chinese online novels as the case study to explore how this unique erotica adapts to the evolving machine censorship to examine the relationship between humans and AI.

Romantic fiction is a genre of online fiction featuring “romantic love”. This culture is characterized by clear portrayals of sexual encounters and erotic scenes. Because of its connection with eroticism, and its alleged violations of conventional norms, online erotica has been subjected to intense national censorship and ethical scrutiny in mainland China. The online platform was sensible to shifts in shifts in policy and anti-pornography campaigns by the government and therefore implemented strict self-censorship systems. This includes automatic monitoring of offending words and several turns of manual censorship. As a result, online writers adopted a series of circumvention strategies to escape from algorithms to accommodate readers' demands for sexual depictions, thus giving birth to a new genre of erotic literature. The emergence of this unique erotic culture reflects the struggle and resistance of contemporary Chinese women under extreme censorship and sexual repression.

Moreover, writers created a range of circumventions, including images, metaphors, and code, to evade the machine’s censorship which exposes the oppression of censorship on people. Humans are struggling with an advancing machine civilization.

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Royal College of Art

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