Fortune Telling Machine

Form: Participatory Installation

Date: Jul 2016

It is a manual fortune telling machine combines by a black acrylic box, an instruction on the table and a crystal cup. Audience is encouraged to roll the handle on the box to get a color ball out. To get a note on the instruction, the audience needs to match the color and the number of the ball to the chart. The last step is to put the used ball back into the crystal cup. This piece addresses the Barnum effect, which is the tendency to accept certain information as true, such as character assessments or horoscopes, even when the information is so vague as to be worthless.