Bryan Chung

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Y2K 與千年蟲之化蝶傳奇

“Y2K and the Millennium Butterflies” is a commissioned work by the Hong Kong Arts Centre in year 2000, which is part of the DigitalNow Festival 2000. The final product is an interactive cdrom distributed free to the Hong Kong public. After the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, the economy suffers from severe recession. The government try hard to advocate the use of information technology as one of the cure of the situation. And at the same time, the Y2K issue put a lot of pressure to the information technology industry. The piece of work bases its story on a traditional chinese folk tale and adapts it in the cyberspace just one day before the new millennium. A couple who committed suicide a thousand years ago are re-born and finding their ways to transform into a pair of butterflies in order to keep their thousand years long love promise. The result is that they just manage to be the Y2K bugs and hack into various public and corporate computer systems and subverting the so-called user friendly interface into anarchic chaos. The piece questions the assumption of technological development and challenges the cliche design guidelines of interface.