Person-to-person connection

In Taiwan, there is the saying, “the most beautiful scenery of Taiwan is its people” when the saying is juxtaposed with the phrase “person-to-person connection” that was made famous by the “Tea house incident” during the pandemic; could this allow us to rediscover the position of people in the world that has been redeployed by virus and the Internet. From the beautiful gap between personal privacy and the public’s right to know, to the beautiful connection and possibility between social distancing and Internet communication.

The homeless in the Wanhua area are an unusual presence in this wave of the pandemic. They are marginalized by the city, after the outbreak, they have no private shelter to quarantine, and they lose their part-time jobs such as holding billboards and handing out leaflets. They became a group of people regarded as a high-risk factor in the local transmission path that should be disconnected from one another, but they are also members of a community where social welfare groups connect locally or through the Internet to assist through difficulties together.

This project is imagining a future of “Board Band”, and Sandwishes Studio collaborated with “Do You a Flavor”. Their process begins with interviews with the homeless, develop and design objectives, and through a group of billboards holders, reimagine the possibility of human billboards and art in the city. The collaboration with  media artist TSAI Chi-Hung for the work Board Band AR utilizes Web AR technology to perform a virtual billboard project, using light boxes and signboards in the city as nodes and information carriers, in the constant disjoint and connections caused by the virus and the Internet, they “re-live” daily meaning and imagination.