Xinrui Li, 11th Feb. 2021

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My client is a digital artist who focuses on the different digital personalities we have in our digital society. I have therefore considered interpersonal and social relations in the context of the digital age as the object of my research.

Due to digital penetration, we are cybernetic individuals in some way, It seems to be that each of us is a semi- cyborg, and that most of the messages we receive are translated through digital, and we create a global information interconnection system that brings everyone to the cloud, including all your memories, relationships and privacy.

So I think just like the language, we know that the language influences people’s thinking to a large extent, in digital age, computational thinking has somewhat replaced human’s act of conscious thought.

It is widely accepted that the key thing that sets humans apart from other carbon-based organisms is that we have thoughts, consciousness, emotions and memories – in other words, this is what we consider to be human’s “authority and dominion”.

I’ve been thinking about the impact and changes that digital socialization has brought to relationships, So I started to think about what was missing from digital social interaction, and one of the immediate things was that people were losing the sensory experience of face-to-face contact. I believe that the digital social environment is misleading, closed and missing in the expression of people’s emotions, so I want to use the language of space to express the missing emotions, through the materials, sounds and atmosphere of the space, to trigger a sense of empathy.

After some research, I was inspired by the need to translate the emotions into a physical form and the need for a primary medium of expression. I want to express spatial empathy through materials or a medium, something that is felt in physical space and is missing in virtual digital social. I hope that by using gas as my medium, that is, a gaseous state composed of countless small solid particles, like smoke or something, a random form under the control of subjective consciousness, within a certain range, an organic form.

My initial concept was derived from an algorithmically generated particle system, symbolising the role that each of our ‘individuals’ plays in the network involved, the ‘algorithm’ being one of regularity and randomness within a certain subjective control, and I tried to find a balance between this and tested the presentation of some materials in terms of ‘randomness under subjective control’, such as wax and foam, as well as one of the basic elements of my scheme: the arc, a curved partition wall. Because of material constraints, my curved form does not fit my concept particularly well, and I will continue to work on it, combining some of the ideas I have gained from experimenting with materials.

Based on my concept I chose to use foam glue to shape my sculpture and I am generally satisfied with the final result.

Bibliography

Kuma, K., 2008. Shizen Na Kenchiku. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten.

Kuma, K., 2015. Onomatopoeia Architecture. Japan: X-knowledge Co., Ltd.

Bridle, J., 2018. New Dark Age. London: Verso.