Yu Shang

This work explores the environment of a dresser and its surrounding landscape to construct a space where the “real” world and the “digital” world interweave and imagine an encounter of “physical I” and “digital I”. The dresser is something that exists in the home, but I try to make it “unhomely”. According to Erndt Jentsch, uncanny is a disturbance of a clear state of inside and outside, it's a mix of "familiar" and "unfamiliar". the double (a concept in uncanny theory) is a way to analyze the relationship between the human physical body and the digital body and to deal with the feeling between ourselves and our reflections. The work consists of wallpaper, an interaction system, videos, some handmade objects, an album, a diorama.

Today, our bodies are extensions of data networks, clicking, linking, and taking selfies, almost everyone is collaging an ideal virtual-self in the online world which comprises their videos, selfies, texts, and all the things they post on the social media. Our physical bodies and virtual-images are two realities in two worlds that exist simultaneously.

The Factory of Beauty is about a virtual dolls’ factory. Dolls are idealized, and they look similar, just like the uniform standard of beauty which is made by consumerism. The doll is a kind of commodity. The bodies that people display on the screen as spectacles are also like commodities, through which they gain satisfaction, confidence, and even money (live streaming). This is the real completion of Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle. Today, people showing themselves online is a process of making spectacles, which is also an industrial production process.

I chose to use collage for the animation because the final appearance of the animation on the screen is not entirely up to me, but is largely determined by the images I can find on the internet. What we look like on screen is not wholly shaped by ourselves, it depends a lot on machines and editing programs, such as cameras and filters, provided by applications that are not designed by the photographer.

Clement Valla talks of Google Earth as ‘a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources’ and of how these sources are ‘updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion’.

In this work satellites image from Google Earth are put together side by side like a puzzle. You still can see the seams are not connected very well, but when it quickly moves over the window, these ‘bugs’ or seams cannot be found by the viewer. Google Earth does not look like earth but resembles other digital materials, however, because we spend so much of our lives looking at these materials it becomes real.

The model looks like an abstract train, which is a closed world between the infrastructure of technology (the tracks) and the superstructure of ideas (the carriage space). We as humans are now in the closed word created by the overlap between digital images and networks. The train is a circular shape that represents how people are in a huge and imperceptible nihilistic vortex.

In 1987, Wolfgang Schivelbusch said first moving images were images from the windows of trains. The screen and train are two sites that have many connections. The train is a closed world that must follow set tracks. Showing that what we are not free to look but set on a particular path. Just like the video or images we look at on screen, the camera chooses what to show us rather than our own eyes. Viewers in front of the screen are always in a passive position