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Creation/Research Support
Intergrass: Traditional Chinese Edition 1.0

This project uses the example of Taiwan’s response to China’s surveillance and control over Mandarin information transfer and storage to highlight the restriction upon the freedom of speech online. Considering several serious issues such as the actual needs and potential difficulties of online information sharing in the past history of information exchange between Taiwan and China, the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this project proposes genetically modified Arabidopsis thaliana as the interface for cross-strait information exchange and vocabulary preservation by integrating information science with genetic engineering and establishing a complete set of methods and teaching instructions. The interface will also serve as a format of anonymous information transfer, proliferation, reproduction and storage when online information cannot be transferred freely under the control of any potential online totalitarian regime or in face of Internet disconnection in the future. Moreover, this project attempts to evoke further discussions about appropriate information warfare strategies in extreme scenarios, ethical code, and self-censorship from the “unclear implications of genetically modified organisms for global ecology.” Treating the C-LAB as our base, we will construct and promote new information carrier, advocate Internet freedom, intervene in social movements with artistic creation, and collaborate with grassroots social activists, tool users and developers, dissidents in the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, civil information distributors in Wuhan, promoters of Internet freedom, information and biological hackers, and so forth, trying to build a global civilian coordination and mutual assistance network able to shake off the shackles of the control over Internet freedom.

CREATORS

Lab of the Distant Relatives

The virtual space of Lab of the Distant Relatives forever exists, but the physical bodies of its members are fluid. For "Intergrass: Traditional Chinese Edition 1.0", Theresa Tsun-Hui TSAO, Po-Min WU, Ko-Chun YANG, Chang-Huei GE, and Wei-Chen CHEN will be responsible for its development.

Although the Theory of Species does not mention the pneuma of living creatures, it describes all organisms as distant relatives. From a legal perspective, Article 983 of Taiwan’s Civil Law Code states that one should not marry a collateral relative by blood within the sixth degree of kinship. According to customary human avoidance behavior, distant relatives are relatives beyond the seventh degree of relations. The theory of the Six Degrees of Separation shows the convergence of the social community era, while relatives beyond the seventh degree are on the enlarged magnetic field of divergence. Our lab works firstly on creating the optimal impacts, and then studies to avoid physical risks. We are always preparing a control lab in contrast to the experimental lab, in which diverging/distracting thoughts procreated immortally.