This installation collects sexually offensive message sent to children detected by NGOs on various social media platforms; by exposing and cumulating these messages, it calls for more attention to child sexual abuse in the cyber spaces and better child protection on multiple levels.
Project Video
Abstract
This project collects sexually offensive message sent to children detected by NGOs on various social media platforms. Most messages in this project’s database are collected by organizations like Bark, ChuLe, and individuals involved in related activisms in various ways, or who has personal experience with the stated CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) issue. The installation is a stand-alone art installation, core components being a Raspberry Pi mini-controller running a program collection input data, and a thermal printer reacting in real-time, printing out the gathered data; printer is placed in a round-shaped transparent glass cover on a pedestal. This physical form is inspired by the “ticker tape machine”, an installation used by businesses to transmit and keep track of stock information around the late 20th century. This particular form was chosen because it perfectly embodies the role of a “perfect listener”, which this installation is designed to embody while pinned to the real world. The project is a step further from the critical discussions conducted in my research paper. The paper aimed at critical analysis of Children’s Online Social Game (COSG) as a media, in order to understand and estimate the flaws in its design and system that made it an environment giving opportunities to online CSA. Through academic research, the paper laid down discussion background for CSA in the cyberspace, by applying existing theories and understandings of CSA to the realm of online spaces to create a legible context. It also examined COSG in its security mechanisms and designed culture, which both contributed as negative factors to online CSA. COSG was taken as an example of such extremely special media and cyberspaces, with growing popularity among children, thus a growing attraction to potential child sex abusers, and at the same time long lacking deserved attention from parents, law makers and justice enforcement agencies.
In all, this project is a response to the issue of CSA in the online world, hoping to invoke such attentions from parents and tech companies, and other parties that play significant roles in dealing with online CSA.
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