The Interledger Community 🌱: The Parallel Society

The Parallel Society — Future Money Final Grant Report #2

Xiaoji Song — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:17:07 +0000

Hi, It is Xiaoji (Xiao Xiao) again. I write, research, perform, and play mostly in Berlin. I work with bordering practices, notions of securities, and infrastructure of alternative political imaginaries. Together with Yve Oh and Yumo Cheng, I founded the interdisciplinary art collective EAST ALIEN COMPANY which negotiates with our curatorial, performative, and time-based practices. In the past months, I can gladly say that I am concluding a milestone for the Parallel Society project.

What is the Parallel Society?

The Parallel Society is a cyber drama taken in the form of a web-based game and interactive fiction on narratives of two main characters: In what ways do a migrant who journeys thousands of miles from their homeland and a rural villager who has only known the town adjacent to their birthplace echo, despite their seemingly disparate backgrounds?
The Parallel Society explores the poetics and the politics behind the stories of historically marginalized communities: by featuring the parallel fate of two characters, a Lebanese migrant in Barcelona and a villager in rural China's Henan province.
The narrative comes down to a format like the 1993 film Groundhog Day, the stories unfold through the retelling of the same stories repeatedly. The audience and player will be trapped in a time loop, where they are invited to re-live the same events repeatedly and make different decisions on how they, as the character in the game, would act.

Project Updates

Through the past few months of the development process, the project now is in the form of both a video installation and a game narrative prototype: the game now has two entry points for two characters' stories and three acts for each of them. Based on the materials from the video installation, I further developed my research and game design with the support of the TuesdayJS game development tool and created introductory tracks, scripts, and visuals for each of the theatrical acts.

Progress on Objectives

Research Updates
In this period of the project, I have two main research questions:

Despite the many academic and policy-oriented definitions of financial exclusion, What exactly are the forms of financial exclusions experienced by the two targeted communities I am working with? How does it manifest in their lived realities?
Considering the importance of the decision for a format like Choose Your Own Adventure game, how does that influence their decison-making process?

Financial exclusion often means "not having access to financial services" narrowly defined as not having a bank account, and "unbanked population". This does not include many who have faced barriers in accessing other financial services despite owning an account, for example, migrants who do not have access to the financial services in the country they reside in but only informal economics networks. The project decides to focus on digital financial exclusion beyond institutional and bureaucratic exclusion as a result of long-standing marginalization. e.g.: the marginalization of migrants in society and, the marginalization of the rural population. Financial inclusion is key to economic empowerment, and lift people out of poverty, and the instruments used vary. However, research has also shown that in quite many countries, financial exclusion or semi-financial exclusion (semi-banked) are voluntary: but what do we mean by voluntary? If one faces racism and lack of access in dealing with financial institutions and decides to not use their provided services on paper, is this voluntary or not?
For the two communities I am targeting, another important factor of their voluntary or involuntary exclusion is access that is connected to the restriction on their freedom of movement. The case of comparison here is the increasingly intensified application of digital technologies in the external bordering practices of the EU and the internal bordering practices of China, and the production and reinforcement of relevant socio-technical imaginaries and spatial imaginaries. Legal scholars such as Paula Pasquali has concluded that the external territorial and legal borders of EU that are the results of a few historical developments such as Lisbon Treaty, and the internal administrative borders of China which are primarily centered around Hukou system, have much in common in its legal modalities and influences by similar economic rationale and securitization tendencies.

These barriers that are not necessarily directly created by financial institutions create higher costs for them to enter the use of financial services provided by financial institutions, which very often are connected with other social-political systems that impact them: for example, the main reason for involuntary financial exclusion for a migrant is the lack of appropriate or accepted document.
Looking again at the concept of 'voluntary' exclusion, it is helpful to understand decisions being made in dealing with financial institutions or financial technical systems as a form of economic behavior. Then the question becomes a more general but rather interesting one: what drives people's economic behavior? There are for sure, many reasons, but following the temporal framework by Elena Esposito, here I quote: 'There has been a great deal of discussion about the role of expectations in economic behavior. Expectations are nothing more than a present reflection on an uncertain future and an attempt to build up an orientation.' What constitute expectations and are connected to expectations, are emotions and imaginaries. It is not news that emotion is extremely important in decision-making, the psychology as well as cognitive science behind decision-making have been playing a key role in advertising, sales, and even scams, for example. The below image is a framework for understanding the connections between emotions and expectations from a psychology research:

Imagination, on the other hand, was also influenced by emotions and influenced the projected expectations of actions. Social imaginaries as a framework often refer to the shared cognitive and normative disclosure of how a society could function. Imagination here matters not only in the sense of determining individual behavior but also in how society can function through symbolic orders. People often find it hard to imagine what's outside of their lived experiences without some external push: in this case, their lived experiences are categorized by the lack of mobility and access. I have drafted my framework of decision-making as below:

To be more specific on the communities, I also did mapping for the needs, barriers, emotions, expectations, and imaginations of the villagers and the migrants based on both literature and conversations. During the mapping, I have identified some of the most important financial services needed by them: remittances and loans. I have also found out that intrinsic survival needs are not always the same as financial need: the financial need can be easily compromised if it seems contradictory to their most important long-term survival need.

Game Design
Based on these research results, I have designed the games using the Tuesday JS visual novel engine: a simple web-based, free and open-source visual novel editor that can be used in a web browser. It is written in JavaScript without using any third party libraries and thus does not require additional software installation. The engine uses standard HTML5 document elements such as div and img. This allows the use of any media format supported by browsers including vector graphics svg, gif animations and css styles.
The game and the cyberdrama will take the form of interactive fiction, and I wish for it to be less like a simulation of choose your own adventure, and more like an interactive poetic intervention that triggers and collages different sensory loops that are relevant to the characters' experiences of exclusion, and their re-living of different decisions before their death. The choice is based on the experiences and feedback gathered from the Open Studio exhibition. The game should function as a form of digital poetry and non-linear narration, where based on the choice of the audience, it showcases different narratives.

The incentive structure of the game is driven by both the poetic narrative and the 'access visual'. The game will feature two visual codes of 'access' that represent whether the character has access or not: for the rural village, the access is based on the color of the 'health code', and for the migrant, the access is based on the identity document. During the 2022 Henan Banks scandal, the government staff changed the health code deliberately to prevent the protests. However, the visuals of the game serve only as an illusion that represents the shadow from the past. The actual narrative is represented by the sound and the text in the game.
How do people know what decisions to make? This is probably the most relevant question for a choose your adventure genre. It is not a plain story here: since emotions, expectations, and imagination are so important for decision-making. If we want people to make different decisions, we have to encourage people to imagine differently and feel differently.

The most important incentive structure is based on this concept: the decisions the audience needs to make while reading the story are based on two things:

The audience has to choose among different options of 'feelings' and 'thoughts' by the characters, and the actions that follow the feelings and thoughts will only appear on the next page.
There will be a hidden variable 'Imagination': the hidden variable is an indication of the capacity of imagination, with each choice the audience makes, the game will be secretly keeping track. Certain choices and content will only be visible if the players have a certain score in their 'Imagination' variable.

Each of the stories has three acts, and each of the acts has different stories each time one plays, each act has an opening audio track. With the support of the media artist Yve Oh, these tracks are produced as important world-building materials. To give an example from Act II in the story of the villager, the track is edited with a recording of a police phone call between a victim of the 2022 Henan bank protest, some audio recordings from the streets of the protest, and a press conference on financial stability in the UK. Through this track, I want to showcase the soundscape of how financial stability in news is disclosed differently in people's actual lives, to show the contrast as well as the echoing themes in these recordings.

Check the audio track for Act II

What’s Next?

I am yet in search of the better way to publish the project and there are still quite some details to polish on my side. The first thought is to publish online, but I am considering making it adapt as an entire website, instead of publish as just a game at Itch.io. I am also in search of opportunities to showcase the video installtion and the cyberdrama in a group exhibition.
I am very interested in exploring the world of digital financial inclusion further, the deeper I dive into the topic, the more I understand the urgency of it, and the importance of building a movement around the topic.

Community Support

Same as before, I would love to hear your thoughts on my creative process, and on the topics that I am working on. What are your personal relationship with money, and financial systems as a whole? Are you in touch with any immigrant communities and communities from rural areas who are historically or still excluded from the financial systems? are you interested in how your work, being a new technology, policy, other forms of innovations, and undefined practices might be helpful for a shared future vision of a financial future with equity and inclusion? Maybe now, even more on how you imagine, what kind of imaginaries do you have when making economic decisions?
Let us read poems, watch video clips, play games, and share our dreams with each other.

Additional Comments

I am very grateful for the opportunity to develop my work in the framework of Interledger and to have the opportunity to develop my research and art practices further by showcasing my work to diverse audiences that I would not usually have the chance to get in touch with. I am also so grateful for the support of the whole team to give understanding and tangible support to my non-linear process for the non-linear narrative. It's been a pleasure to work with everyone!

The Parallel Society — Future Money Progress Grant Report #1

Xiaoji Song — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 04:19:51 +0000

Hello! I am Xiaoji (Xiao Xiao). I am an artist, researcher, activist, and community organizer based in Berlin but my heart is always in my hometown Wuhan. Many of you, I have already met in Costa Rica, and many of you I have not yet met, nice to virtually meet you!
I have had already conversations with many of you on what I care about the most, feelings, emotions, politics, politics of emotions, the mix of all these, the things that are not always comfortable to talk about but are extremely relevant for all of us. To have these critical conversations, we need a space with a sense of safety and community care, but also a space that allows radical imagination. That is also what my work is often about: to facilitate critical conversation in a safe and caring space, and to build infrastructure for radical imagination.
This is also the kind of work I wish to do with my project, as the Interledger FUTURE|MONEY grantee. I am incredibly honored and grateful for having the opportunity in trying to stimulate some dialogues and poetic imaginaries on how the future might hold in our everchanging financial systems through the lens of our personal relationship with the financial systems we reside in. So as promised, I am here to provide some updates on the specific progress in the past months.

Project Update

Like any other art project I have done in the past, the Parallel Society is a bumpy road. In the past months, I have worked back and forth by iterating my methodologies, mediums, creative focus, and narratives. However messy the process is, I am happy to say that I have manufactured a concise structure with some tangible and poetic sketches to pave the way for the coming months of production time. Last month, in November 2023, based on the current progress, I gladly had the pleasure of participating in the Open Studio Exhibition during the summit. With the help of Lawil, Chris, Kokayi, Ayesha and Hollis and many many other wonderful artists, staff, friends, I manage to put together a video installation that fits my vision, with a velvet blanket, gold dusts all around, and a mirror as the screen for my poetic interludes. My video installation features three visual poems on the emotional relationships the characters have with money, which was visited by many, and helped me to start so many intimate and incredibly relevant conversations. It was truly a powerful experience to see people connecting with my work, and sensing that it has been meaningful for them.

So, what is the Parallel Society actually about?
To first introduce the project: In what ways do a migrant who journeys thousands of miles from their homeland and a rural villager who has only known the town adjacent to their birthplace echo, despite their seemingly disparate backgrounds?
The Parallel Society is a cyber drama that explores the emotional dimensions of being historically marginalized and therefore excluded from financial systems, by featuring the parallel fate of two characters, a Lebanese migrant in Barcelona and a villager in rural China's Henan province. The game sheds light on financial traumas, such as behavior patterns and psychological impacts as results of financial exclusions experienced by these two characters, and radically imagines a world where such barriers no longer exist, but the characters are still trapped in the old pattern. The fictional borderless state is an "in-between afterlife", a mystical dream-like world they were transported to after their deaths.

During the last months, I managed to have my vision slowly turning into reality in the visual and literary spaces, but am still working out the design of incentive structures for the interactive part of the game. The current research and experiments are showcased in the video installation, and I was invited to a panel talk that is relevant to my research. The following is my specific progress.

Progress on Objectives

Research Updates

I often work with community-specific experiences: The Parallel Society project aims to target two specific communities: migrant communities who often face assimilation pressure without any support to navigate the bureaucratic violence in their society, and the rural working class who face limited mobility, access to educational resources, and financial services. These two groups share a disadvantaged position due to financial exclusion resulting from multiple barriers. In the backstory of the project, a migrant was scammed by a currency exchange scheme targeting the diaspora and committed suicide after realizing the money was gone, and a villager who lost his life savings in a rural bank collapse due to local government corruption and died in a protest, with no access to other financial services due to the Hukou system's strict internal mobility control. Both stories are based on real events that have received limited media coverage. Despite both characters and the communities they represent being historically excluded, they are often pitted against each other in political discourse due to the media framing, asymmetry of information, and financial traumas that have influenced their ways of living, expressing themselves, and seeing each other.
In the past months, I spent the majority of my time conducting extensive research for writing and designing the narrative of the game. Trained as a social scientist, but worked often in the interdisciplinary arenas, I often work with a mix of artistic research and qualitative research methodology. Firstly, I was focusing on the emotional aspects of financial exclusion, the embodiment of inclusion and exclusion by drawing from literature ranging from sociological, and psychological to philosophical contributions. This supports me in narrowing a few exploratory domains on the directions that my project would go, for example, this study on the embodiment of (non)belongings has been an inspiration and have given a range of analytical angles that opens my understanding of "belonging", and see how it can be of relevance to the topic of the financial system as a whole. I have also summarized a few thematic that often occur in literature, trauma, anxiety, sense of belonging, bureaucracy, lack of access, sense of time, and trust. I have also noted, for immigrants and villagers, the different but also parallel occurring thematic: for immigrants, avoidance, overspending, frugality, lack of trust, semi-banked, and fraud are common statutes; for villagers, the common themes are money avoidance, under-earning, frugality, sense of scarcity, semi-banked, governmental restrictions.
To touch upon these specifics, I have also conducted research based on the contexts of the two characters, immigrant communities in Spain and the rural population in China. In both Spain and Henan, China, distinct financial challenges confront immigrant communities and the rural population, respectively, with noteworthy parallels. Immigrants in Spain, often younger and residing in lower-income households, exhibit disparities in possessing financial products compared to native-born individuals, as highlighted by the Survey of Financial Competences and research reports, similarly, the rural population in Henan faces compounded challenges due to the restrictive Hukou system and the fallout from the collapse of four rural banks in April 2022. The Hukou system limits access to vital services, mirroring the financial exclusion experienced by immigrants. The banking crisis, stemming from financial misconduct, prompted widespread protests among the rural population, emphasizing shared frustrations and the need for central government intervention to address systemic issues and economic vulnerabilities. Recognizing and addressing these disparities is crucial for fostering social and economic inclusion in both contexts.

Game Design: Narratives

Based on this contextual information and also research findings about the dimensions of the lasting impact of exclusion on marginalized groups' emotional relationship with money. I started to write the biographies of the characters. By embodying these characters, I started to write monologues and poems that are based on these monologues.
To give an example of one of the poems written during the process:

I always fantasize that I get to have a pick

I often say that I do not remember that day
When the news hit, I smelled the burned pig fat from the oven
Spanish police took 4 days to process a request from me
Overslept, with doors open
The lady from Shanghai came into the restaurant
With sleek promises
Showering the standing 53 years old immigrant with affection
Resting, with doors open
The swift account creation with an oily phone screen protector
Half broken, with cracks
Stand up, shall we?
Resting our case
After 24 years and 5 months, after 2 restaurants and 3 children, after boat and dragon
We stand, up and upside down
Too many missed accounts
Your father needs this, she said
I cannot jump up and refute
The tangling feeling, the rash
The ever-evolving landscape of the nation, >nation states, states of the nation
States of leaking pipes, hovering over my >ears
The sound of counting the clicking >hallucination of integration
Between the lady from Shanghai and the lady >from the front desk
I always fantasize that I get to have a pick

Multimedia and Installation

In the meantime, I started to collect and organize visual materials that share similar codes with the poems and characters I am developing, from footage of money to the archival footage of political memories that are relevant to the characters. I produced in this process the video poetry for the Interledger exhibition: the Poetic Interludes.
By putting together one poem that represents the lived experience of the immigrant community, one that represents the lived experience of the rural villagers, and one poem that represents their parallel experiences, the video installation prompts visitors to look down to the mirror below them, which are placed on top of a red velvet blanket and covered in gold dust.
During the Open Studio, I invite everyone to step on top of the velvet blanket and read the video poetry together with me.

Other Progress

In my original proposal, I have proposed some goals I wish to achieve, when I have a chance to connect with such a diverse community of technologists, policymakers, artists, community organizers, and other practitioners in their fields trying to change the world for the better.
One of the goals is that by promoting greater visibility for the long-term psychological impacts and relevant behavior patterns of the communities affected by financial exclusion, I want to create more possibilities for these marginalized communities to be seen and heard, and also for topics such as emotional relationships with money to be of bigger relevance in the discourse around financial inclusion. I gladly want to share that I think I have managed to make progress in this goal of mine. Besides all the wonderful and sincere conversations I have had with the visitors of the exhibitions and the new friendship formed in the process, I was also honored to be invited to a panel talk hosted by Raashi Saxena and joined by Victoria Coker and Julaire Hall on Women of Color Reshaping Financial Inclusion. It was an absolute blast to share a stage with these inspiring, outspoken, sharp-minded women. Together, using our diverse sociocultural backgrounds and situated knowledge, we discuss our experiences with the ILP community, as well as open payment standards, on both personal and systemic accounts. By analyzing and comparing our diverse backgrounds and best practices with advancing gender equality in our fields, we brought about our visions and proposals for how the financial services by ILP can support women of color from diverse backgrounds all around the globe.
Additionally, The Parallel Society project aims to inspire more participatory design in the research and development process of relevant tools in the open payment system ecology. By highlighting the underlying behavioral patterns resulting from financial exclusion, the game invites players to imagine and work towards a more equitable financial system, and to engage in democratic technological governance by empowering affected communities to understand and participate in the debates and development of such systems. I also consider my participation in the summit to be a huge step towards this objective, through the dialogues I had the privilege to have during the panel, as well as in the continued exchanges during the summit period.

Some More Thoughts...

What’s Next?

So, the next steps are quite clear now!
Generally, embrace the messiness in the process, and embrace how messy and complex the reality is for the marginalized communities I am working with. For the coming months, I will be busy taking these lessons and thoughts into the development of the incentive structures and the narrative and thinking about what forms of inclusion work and open payment standards application would actually support these communities in need. Specifically, I will start to get in touch with developers, build the web of narratives, and start to translate them into an interactive journey for real.

Community Support

I would love to connect with you, in whatever ways. Your lived experience and feedback would be of immense help. New and old friends, let's get in touch! I would love to hear your thoughts on my creative process, and on the topics that I am working on. What are your personal relationship with money, and financial systems as a whole? Are you in touch with any immigrant communities and communities from rural areas who are historically or still excluded from the financial systems? are you interested in how your work, being a new technology, policy, other forms of innovations, and undefined practices might be helpful for a shared future vision of a financial future with equity and inclusion?
Let us read poems, watch video clips, play games, and share our dreams with each other.

Additional Comments

I am so grateful for the past few months: As a migrant from a diaspora family, I did not grow up hearing stories about people like myself and looking at artworks that reflect my lived experiences. Now as an artist, I believe it is my responsibility to lift marginalized communities' lived experiences to the stage of being seen and heard, creating dialogues in caring and safer environments. To achieve this, I focus on crafting socially relevant and community-specific experiences. In my past projects, I worked with migrant women, refugees in Germany and the Netherlands, villagers in rural Bulgaria, and political dissidents of authoritarian regimes. I want to create experiences that matter to them and bring their perspectives into the urgent public conversations of our time. This is very often not easy to have resources that support me to bring my work to a diverse audience beyond the art world regulars in the institutional structure I often work with. I am therefore incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to bring these marginalised experiences to you all through my work here.