// new media class


Dawoon Park — Waste Does Not Communicate

Five Lines of Code (Short-term Project) — Winter 2019

The signs written on screen are 5 lines of code written in “Ahee” and translate to ‘Waste Does Not Communicate’ in JavaScript. Ahee is an alternative programming language that is esoteric and inefficient and therefore not very widespread. It was developed exclusively in Hangul, and exist as a proof-of-idea.

A Big Data company scores humans from “shooting stars” to “waste” based on their value as digital datasets. “Waste” is a digital outcast who is not present on the network at all. In that sense, Ahee can be seen as WASTE.*

But Ahee is a LUXURY. Because it escapes the achievement-principle entirely – especially in the sector of digital computing, where everything is streamlined to be as efficient as possible. Ahee is outside the digital landscape of multitasking between different sources of information and processes, and scattering ones own awareness. Ahee has nothing to do with practicality or processuality. Ahee does not communicate, but stays the way it is “So-Sein”.

*Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, S. Fischer Verlag 2014

film by Yannick Spiess