We Came Up With 14 Ideas in 14 Days After We Got Married, and We Finished All of Them

Here's how it started: Last October, Jmill (now husband, then boyfriend) and I were visiting our friends Moises and Fabiola in Miami. While walking around their apartment complex, Moises said they were planning to organize an Internat Yami-ichi in January. We were immediately curious, and asked about what that is.

The Internet Yami-Ichi originated in Tokyo, Japan in 2012 and was organized by an online internet art community called IDPW. It started because an iOS app made by a member of the club was rejected by Apple. It was rejected because it was not useful enough and/or entertaining enough for Apple users. As revenge, they decided to bring the internet to the real world. They wanted to create market where people interact face to face, and no one can tell you what you made isn't entertaining or useful. This event spread all over the world and was organized in a decentralized manner by various people. To organize a Yami-Ichi, all you need to do is to email the founders that you want to hold it, and they will put your event information and photos on the official website. Jmill's eyes lit up when he heard about this event, and although he couldn't participate in the Miami Yami-Ichi, he really wanted to make one happen at Mars College.

Jmill and I got married at Mars College on March 18th of this year. After a day of rest, we started organizing this event with Martians. We decided to hold it on April 1st, the third day of the Bombay Beach Biennale, when many tourists and artists come to the town. We had two weeks to find participants, make our own projects, and prepare the venue. Many thanks to Gene who provided the venue for free, Nico who helped set up the venue, Kirby who made a cool logo, Will who made a cool physical laser-cut sign, and all the artists who I will introduce below. These complete list of projects can be found on the BBYI Website.

First of all, I would like to self-promote my work with Jmill.

This work is called Obsidian Vault, referencing the famous knowledge management software featuring linked notes. I picked up these obsidian stones on the roadside near Salton Sea. At that time I thought I could make something related to Obsidian Notes, but hadn't figured out how to present it. Eventually, the idea came up that people could write their notes on a purple post-it and exchange it for an obsidian rock. This project was so popular that we ran out of obsidian, but people were still writing notes. We had no choice but to pick up gravel from the yard to exchange their notes :P. We received so much interesting knowledge that we had to marvel at how varied the human brain can be. We even had some people write notes linked to other notes (see bottom right).

The second project we did was called EitherRocks, which came from an OG NFT project called Ether Rocks. When I was exploring the old Navy site in Salton Sea, I risked being killed by a grenade and picked up a pile of transparent volcanic rocks called Gypsum. Jmill suggested that I could make a project related to Ether Rocks. Since most NFTs have traits to indicate rarity, we thought we could use Sims 1's personality traits on the rocks. We carefully scored the characteristics of each rock according to the five traits of Neat, Outgoing, Active, Playful, and Nice, and wrote them on the package. We were also able to map many of them them to people we know IRL. They almost felt alive to us now! In terms of why we call this work EitherRocks is because the player must blindly choose two rocks from the bag, open their eyes, and choose one of the rocks to take away. Either this rock or that rock. Hence, EitherRocks. Perhaps because it was too cryptic, only one of the visitors got the original reference.

Next up is the work of Josh, a digital nomad who is super responsible and comfortable to communicate with. But he doesn't use social networking software at all and usually only communicates by email and text message. One of his projects was a free Facebook registration form for everyone to fill out. It's super detailed, focused, and intriguing. Only issue is that the registration turnaround time right now is around 12-15 business days.

Vincent is a "multi-functional" artist who is able to link software and hardware through the Touch Designer software. He set up an installation for the Yami-Ichi called Shadow Selfies, which I prefer to call an AI roasting machine. When you get close to the mirror, it automatically takes a picture of you and then uses OpenAI's GPT-3 to analyze your appearance, generate a paragraph to cyber-bully you and broadcast it in a robotic female voice

Karo, the author of the work on the left below, is a very healing artist. She specializes in fortune telling and has an amazing intuition and ability to calm people. Every time I interact with her, I feel like I'm in a warm spa holding a mint-flavored cold drink. She bought two headphone headbands and made the headphone cups with obsidian and palm leaves respectively. I feel my brain will automatically shift into nature once I put them on.

The picture on the right is an AI chatbot booklet made by an ADHD biologist named Marzipan. He likes to do remix poetry with AI and text he wrote. His prompt for AI is one the highest quality prompts I've ever seen, able to bring out the most unique and interesting side of AI. Mars College has four divisions, representing water, earth, fire and air. He gave Chatsubo, who represents the Fire God, a very hot character at last year's Mars College. Chatsubo is a bit of a cynical old man, speaking very directly, sometimes very rude, but with a very human touch. This booklet is a collection of conversations between Martians and Chatsubo. The asking price was a nugget of weed. There was one taker.

The Internet black market, of course, will have people who make digitally inspired food and treats. Over the years, there are those who make cookies, representing HTTP cookies, and those who make raspberry pies (Raspberry Pi). Our Yami-Ichi has Cursor Cookies. The author of this work is Chebel, an artist from Brazil who does everything from VR to film, and has recently been working with her partner Ygor on a very trippy but super engaging animation using AI. In the past she has helped local female sex workers in Brazil to sell soap to support themselves during the pandemic. Her work focuses on nature, animals, and women, those who are considered as non-mainstream characters. I really admire her work.

On the right is an Instagram Frame placemat. Jmill had the idea and I designed and created it. It's a very Meta piece (pun intended). This is also the first time I've worked with a Chinese manufacturer. I was very excited when I received the test batch. I felt very accomplished seeing the idea come to fruition.

Finally, the best sellers were these stickers. The first one is a FOMO spectrum meme sticker made by a Martian named Sam. Before coming to Mars, Sam was researching how to how to make museum exhibitions more interesting and engaging. She discovered that people can have not only FOMO but also JOMO (Joy of Missing Out). Then if you add the other two ends of the spectrum, there will be FOJI (Fear of Joining In) and JOJI (Joy of Joining In). JOJI is probably the best experience that people can have out of the four options.

The second is the BBYI logo designed by Kirby, whose art always has iridescent colors and trippy geometric shapes. The center of the logo is a fish bone, representing the dead fish bones on the polluted Salton Sea beach. The fish's eye is Apple's loading cursor.

The third is inspired by the anime Dennou Coil, where they use Japanese talisman papers to fix certain computer bugs. So I thought it would be cool if I do a Chinese version of it. If you stick it on your computer, it is proven to reduce computer bugs by 30% :)

There are many more works not introduced here. You can go to the BBYI website to see the complete list. We learned many things from our first time hosting this event. Bombay Beach is a very gift-oriented place. It's a bit similar to the Burning Man Festival, where there is no money or commerce and all things are gift exchanges. One of the most popular works at our Yami-Ichi was the Obsidian Vault, which was free, interactive and everyone had a lot of fun collaborating with each other. This event also made me realize that if you have something you want to show to the world, people will help you to achieve it. But you have to believe that it will happen and execute the necessary steps. And given its low-stakes, low-expectation nature, this event also enabled a lot of people who are not artists to get involved and stimulate their creativity. We made a lot of "useless" stuff, but we attracted a lot of people who are just as weird as we are to appreciate our work. We may have not made any money, but we got a lot of psychologically enriching experiences which may be even more valuable.