Abstract

Please visit http://www.cyberfortune.info to experience an adventure journey of fortune-telling.

This research consists of an exegesis and a creative project. It focuses on an assumption about fortune-telling: The Internet and computers may have a mysterious power to predict something that people do not know yet. In this experiment, a net art creation is used to present this notion, which is particularly based on the tension of collaborative creation on the Internet. Hence, while users are participating in the procedure of fortune-telling, they are contributing to the net art project as well.
This research project does not try to answer how accurate fortune-telling is, or attempt to interpret the meaning of its prediction, although I have studied a range of rational arguments of doing fortune-telling through the Internet.This project not only has examined the folk culture of fortune-telling itself, but also the phenomenon of the combination of folk culture and digital culture, particularly how people’s behaviour has changed throughout the hi-tech era. Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and synchronicity, and the discoveries on binary arithmetic by Leibniz are indeed ideas that have assisted me in understanding the rationality of fortune-telling, and the way of finding patterns within the Internet.

Taiwanese fortune-telling culture is embedded in traditional Taiwanese cultural activities. With science and technology rapidly developing and the capacity of the Internet constantly advancing, the culture of fortune-telling, therefore, has been transformed from a traditional figure into a new interactive platform within the Internet, and recently has formed a special occult-style creation within this scientific and technological era, which I have named Cyber Fortune.

In order to formulate the nature of fortune-telling, the calculating method of the traditional I Ching and the interpretations of its text have been applied in this project. With the application of digital content and the feature of interaction between Internet and users, a breakthrough in the sense of visualization is created. In addition, this project also attempts to integrate traditional cultural lore, the digital media logic of the computer and the Internet into an original net art project, which serves as a cyber fortune-teller and user-generated collaborative creative website.

Key terms:
Cyber Fortune, Fortune-telling, Net art, Internet art, web art, collaborative creation, user-generated collaborative creative, Taiwan