The Collider
The Collider is a door that opens only for people who manage to act as if it doesn’t exist.
by Danqing Shi, Ke Fang, Junjie Yu, Yunzi Qian, Yin Li (Tsinghua University) , selected in Ars Electronica 2014 Linz Austria
The Collider is a door that opens only for people who manage to act as if it doesn’t exist. People are told to run towards the locked door, having been assured that the door will open at the very last moment before they hit it¾if they keep their speed up and don’t hesitate or slow down. This instantaneous experience is a provocative test of the human-machine trust relationship.
The Collider consists of a 15-meter corridor with a mechanic door at the end. Along the corridor, detectors are installed to detect the position and velocity of the participant. As soon as the participant passes the first detector, the computer begins to record the running speed. When they pass the last detector, the computer analyzes the speed curve to see how “trusting” the participant is. The door is initially locked with a magnet lock. If the computer sends an “open” signal for the “trusting” participant, the magnet switches off and springs suddenly pull the door open, letting the participant run through at high speed.
The Collider is a metaphor of this complex human-machine world. To a certain degree we trust the machine we built and try
to explore with it. But the conflict never disappears. When Google announced the unmanned car, the same question arose: whether to trust a machine¾in this case the automated brake of the unmanned car, and in our case the automated door. Can we really trust technology? This is the question that participants are forced to ask and answer for themselves, in a highly condensed 15-meter-3-second situation, when propelling their real human body towards a door that the computer will only decide to open or keep closed when they are less than a meter away from it.
Absurd, but intriguing. Participants are challenged by the mechanism that inspires their curiosity and courage and motivates them to try and accelerate. But as they approach the door, fear and distrust rapidly outweigh their aggression. If they slow down, we keep the door locked, holding that the conflicts are not accelerated to a reaction energy level. However, if the participant keeps accelerating, the door will open quickly at the last moment¾so energetically that all the tenseness and conflict instantaneously explode. No collision takes place in the physical world, but an anticipated reaction explodes in mind.
