Exploring Chinese specific social and cultural themes has been a long interest of mine, and I wanted to extend this to my final project for this class. The project goals and research aims have remained mostly the same from previous weeks. I aim to tell a story about a part of China’s turbulent history that goes beyond just data, and goes beyond the simplification of the One Child Policy as population control. I also make it a goal to explore how I can use data and 3D modeling not as main medium/message of the project, but as a small part of a larger, multi-media piece with other elements that can help heighten the visual appeal of 3D printed objects. Finally, this year I have been extremely interested in how I can apply computational skills—something I am already strong at—with more analog ones—something that I am not that strong at, but would like to use in future art works, and I believe this project speaks to that.
A description of the project as described by poster is:
This project is a re-imagination of the- birth control propaganda that was distributed during the era of the One Child Pol- icy, an era where wom- en were forced to use many different forms of birth control, such as forced sterilization, IUDS, and birth control pills. I take data on China’s contraceptive usage and fertility rate to model a 28 pack of birth control pills. I show how the goals of the One Child Policy was more than just population, but disentangled with the politics of “control” it pertains to women’s autonomy and choice over their own bodies.
My first step was gathering the data. I initially struggled because I was trying to look for data specifically on the OCP, however after discussing with my peers I realized this was not necessary. Instead, I could gather data in relevant areas but then transform it into a unified topic. Thus, I chose to gather data on fertility rate, to demonstrate the population, family planning aspect of the theme, but also contraceptive use. The database that I took from can be found at the following link:
The corresponding files:
UNMODIFIED-fertility-rate-and-contraceptive-use.csv
MODIFIED-fertility-contraceptive.csv
Finally, when it came time to think of the object to make, I went back and forth between many things. The idea of creating parameterized IUD’s or uteruses sounded interesting; however, I noticed many other artists that explored this topic used those symbols. Because my data did not specify what kind of contraceptives women were using, it gave me a lot of space to choose a range of objects. I think importantly, what I wanted to show with this piece is how the OCP era requires a temporal, historical analysis in order to understand it to the fullest. Showing a progression of the state’s control Additionally, I wanted audiences to be able to imagine how it may have felt as a woman to be subject to such control, and to imagine the feeling of actually having to ingest contraception. For these reasons, I choose to model birth control pills.
To begin creating the pills, I first extrapolated the data in Grasshopper. This required extra steps that I had not planned for, because even with this data, which extends from 1960-2021, I found that for contraception, there was actually missing data in several years (shown in the UNMODIFIED file). To remedy this, I input the data in excel and did a graph analysis, which told me that it was following a linear growth path. I then performed series prediciton on the missing values and edited the original file (shown in the MODIFIED file).
After the data was filled in, I followed the tutorial from Week 10 to extrapolate two lists: one for fertility rate, and the second for contraceptive use. Each list had a total of 28 items to account for the 28 pills in a pack and covered the years between 1970-1997. I chose these years because 1) data for contraceptive use was not recorded until after 1970 and 2) because I wanted to show a good range before the onset of the OCP and after.
