Chenyan Zhu

Symbiotic Subversion

I wanted to explore the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants using a 'post-human' design concept that makes humans decent. Using devices that wrap the human world through irregular and fluid plants thereby giving humans a deeper sense of the presence of plants in the world and their impact on humans and the world, and creating an entangled symbiotic relationship with plants.

In A Brief History of Homo sapiens, the domestication of plants by humans in the agricultural revolution is presented from the perspective of wheat. Humans thought they had domesticated plants, but in fact it was the plants that domesticated Homo sapiens. I argue that perhaps humans are simply tools of the plant, that the plant controls our bodies and even our consciousness, making us think that we are still in control. In trying to domesticate wheat, humans have actually inadvertently changed their way of life, such as weeding and diverting water for the survival of wheat.

In fact, we have not domesticated wheat, but wheat has domesticated us.The key to the conflict between man and nature is the widespread belief that man is the spirit of all things, not part of nature, but beyond it. Judaism and Christian theology, for example, see man as a special creation of God in his own image, that of all things in the world only man is endowed with a soul, that all things in the world are created to serve man, and that there is an unbridgeable gap between man and the other animals.

Description , Project video and the website

Within the boundary between humans and technology, through the incompleteness and gaps, what do we see?

Inspired by the obsession with ruins, which transforms past grandeur into an illusion and a projection of human desire. That inherent incompleteness of the scattered fragments, therefore, creates spaces in imagination. The simultaneous coexistence of despair and fascination can be observed in ruins and also in the digital fragments peculiar to our time.

A projection installation that explores the relationship between humans and technology through incompleteness, imagination, and desire. Through incompleteness, we trace back to the past glory of history, project ourselves into the "avatar" as new incarnations at present moment, and leave pieces of digital rubble as our legacy for the future to reconstruct and portray. 

It seeks to explore the flowing and blurred boundaries between humans and technology when perceiving different times, aiming to provoke reflection on the role of technology in shaping our perceptions and experiences of the world. The audience will stand in front of each section representing different times in the exhibition, interacting with and observing the projection of humans. This will enable them to witness and contemplate our relationship with technology

https://youtu.be/KFGL58Qedig 

https://flowing-boundaries.glitch.me/ 

Description

The keywords of our project are toxic relationships, human and nature, and non-human perspective. During the process of brainstorming, we first shared the personal stories of our relationships with parents, and from here, we noticed that all of us were trapped or are struggling with the multiple issues with parents, especially most of us come from a traditional Chinese family, and the core is that we all agree our relationships with them are somehow toxic in different ways. Then one of us told a story of her relationship with her pet, where she pointed out that it can be seen as a reflection of the parent-children relationship we talked about. The fact that she thought the main reason she only loves her own pet rather than other animals is that her definite possession over her cat. It is not only the reflection of our family relationships, but also our relationship with nature, or say, the relationship between human and nature. When you think about it further, these three actually share the same concepts. Possession, we believe, it’s the keyword. Therefore, through this project, we intend to start from exploring the toxic relationship between humans, especially focus on parent-children relationship, and eventually generate to the discussion of human-nature relationship.

The reason for developing this project is as the same generation that were raised in traditional Chinese families, we believe that we are not the only ones that suffer from the toxic relationships among families. We are overwhelmed and confused by the fact that why human relationships can never come to a balance? And it is just like our relationship as humans with nature, and speaking of it, here leads to another focus - we are wondering what will happen if the perspective changes? We tried to put ourselves into non-human and think from their perspective but eventually we failed, we couldn’t help to view things from human perspective, that’s our limit, therefore, we hope to explore and possibility to view relationship in a non-human perspective, and we encourage audience to try with us, while relooking their own relationships with everything surrounding, we also intend to open up a chance for them to view it from a non-human perspective.