Wen Shi

Do you think your life is wonderful? My friend asked me.

 I really want to say yes. 

Supportive family, healthy relationships, the freedom to do anything and explore anything. 

They asked me, living in such a great life, what else am I dissatisfied with?

But Why? Why does my inner self want to say no? 

Why am I always tired, and shame to say. 

But feeling will not deceive.

I'm accelerating.

But I am standing still.

The state of accelerated progress of individual in society.

The contrast between the relative stasis of one's own life and the unavoidable accelerated movement.

Medium: Unreal Engine5, Blender, Processing, Images

Repetitive life, inevitable sense of social alienation. 

Decreased perceptiveness, from an initial sense of good to later feelings of meaninglessness.

Medium: Blender

Seeking perception, experiencing a shift in state after attaining resonance.

Medium: Blender

“In the time and place that resonates with the world, we are non-alienated.”

See whole project on the website:

https://wen-shi.icu

Sanhe is a talent market located in Longhua District, Shenzhen, which provides work from factories to people who don’t have high education.The word Sanhe comes from the name of the largest human resources company in the region. 

Known as Gods of Sanhe, around the Sanhe talent market, a group of young people have rebelled against the pressure of menial labor and have chosen to renounce material pursuits in exchange for the relative freedom and leisure of unemployment. 

Under the background of precarity of society, Gods of Sanhe are typical victims of social alienation who are unable to integrate into the mainstream social structure and have been marginalized by society. When they first arrived in Shenzhen, these determined and ambitious young individuals also sought to change their lives through their own labor. This ideology was instilled in them through the education system of their country - that labor is honorable, and a better life is to be created with one's own hands.

However, after experiencing exploitation by capital and realizing that their efforts alone cannot change their circumstances, they fell into a sense of powerlessness. In the field of philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir proposed that a prominent characteristic of alienation is a sense of powerlessness. When an individual becomes aware of the gap between what they want to do and what they feel capable of doing, they experience alienation in the form of 'powerlessness.' Consequently, they entered a state of meaninglessness, not knowing why they had to work in factories. However, after witnessing the prosperity of the big city, they were unwilling to return to their hometown. Instead, this group of people stayed in the Sanhe area, doing daily wage work and earning enough for three days of expenses in a single day. They had no material desires, which is why they were called as gods by the people in that area. Their fame stemmed from their "lying flat" lifestyle, and many young people envied their freedom from the shackles of capitalist structures. However, in reality, this kind of life was not the ideal life they pursued. It was a manifestation of social alienation, as they were trapped in this area and unable to integrate into the social structure.

Many young workers see no value in maintaining an ID card, which represents a legal identity and political / economic status  and sell their ID cards for less than 15 pounds. They are often limited by their limited education and access to information to make informed decisions.

After losing their identity cards, the gods of Sanhe were unable to leave the area. They lived like shadows of society, even though new identities may have emerged, those identities were no longer relevant to them. Their extreme alienation is a reflection found in various corners of the social structure.

The final way to respond was a small exhibition with multipart installation, which includes a variety of experiments we made, and the process and results were interesting.

This is the pre-research of project In-der-Welt-Sein（Being-in-the-world）

I aim to use immersive interactive techniques that lead the audience to explore the microbial colonization of the mother and baby in the scene.

What makes us who we are? The answer for most people is DNA, which determines our genetics and how we grow from the kind of baby we are to the kind of person we become. However, in addition to DNA, exposure to microbes during infancy has a large impact on human development. There is a magical microbial transmission relationship between mother and infant, and from birth, these microorganisms are brought along at different stages as a gift from the mother and then colonize the gut. But because of a number of factors, such as different way of birth and different feeding practices, infants acquire different microbes and the colonization of these microbes will have different effects.

In this area, I will focus on exploring how these microorganisms brought by the mother influence the subsequent development of the infant, leading the audience to understand and feel the impact of microbial colonization in an immersive experience. In this immersive interactive experience, the audience will explore the relationship between maternal and infant microbial colonization, feel the impact of microbial colonization, and allow the community of current, soon-to-be, or future mothers to understand how to help their infants better access diverse microbes and ease the anxiety of new mothers.

Climate change accelerates the aberration process for non-human. As the unstoppable creating process, it will continually produce more adaptive aberration to resilient this world.

We create an aberration world through digital technology, generating an immersive experience for audiences to explore the abnormal world. All efforts aim to call for attention and action on climate change issue.

This project made by 6 designers and artists from the Royal College of Art's Information Experience Design.