Xueqing Yu

In this project, I have attempted to use the shaping of fiction as a starting point to depict and explore the possibilities of these issues through storytelling, frame-by-frame animation, and audio-visual.

In search of the body in the information age is a field that has always interested me and remains in my mind as a question. On the one hand, with the development of science and technology, artificial intelligence, post-humanity, gene editing becoming explicit, it could be almost said that everyone is a Cyborg, and we are facing a future of "de-corporealization"; on the other hand, capitalism has developed the body into a commodity, creating all kinds of desires and reproducing them with consumption as a tool of both a society of landscape and a society of regulation.

What has shaped our perception and reality of the body today? Where and how are we going to reclaim and guard our bodies? Where is the so-called "I" located? How are the boundaries of the body to be defined? Faced with these important and ambitious questions, I wish to discuss them in an original form: imagination and mythology.

In this project, I have attempted to use the shaping of fiction as a starting point to depict and explore the possibilities of these issues through storytelling, frame-by-frame animation, and audio-visual. During my classes at Goldsmiths, I have experimented with short video filmmaking, scriptwriting in my option modules, and social media as a medium in my minor project. My personal aim is to experiment with as many different mediums as possible to observe the world and explore issues in the graduate period.

Likewise, corresponding to the core of my discussion in this project, the senses, different media techniques mobilise different sensory feedbacks and influence the way the body thinks and interprets. The documentary approach was ruled out due to the geographical constraints of the epidemic's situation, which prevented me from going out to film; by the course of developing the screen idea, I learned that film is a narrative made up of a series of footage linked together, but as I can not draw, I tried to tell the story using video games. After practicing games such as Journey, My World, and Second Life, I found that the storyline and art style of the game itself was pretty restrictive to the story I wanted to shape. So the second approach was ruled out as well; I ended up locking in my approach to animation.

I was inspired by two students at SVA in New York creating with collage and frame-by-frame animation, a two-dimensional, rustic, throwback style that seems clunky but refreshing in an age of 3D, AR and VR and even holograms. The use of collage as method, which itself implies a reality constructed by numerous types of medium, is a metaphor for today's landscaped society.