Jojo-Shuhan Zan

Jojo Zan is a digital fashion artist and designer, born in Beijing and now based in London. She specializes in using AR and VR forms to create “bridges” between the digital and physical worlds. She explores and uses different new technologies to enrich her art language. She is also a "Gravity Sketch Student Ambassador". Jojo uses VR and AR as her media of expression, and she has published her works as a creator on Instagram, Snapchat, Adobe, 8th Wall, and TikTok. She also collaborated with Meta on the "Queens of the Metaverse" project, where she was responsible for the VR and AR design.

Jojo believes that in the current context of digital popularity and AI rapid development, the impacts behind them cannot be ignored. Her works mostly relate to the relationship between human technological development and the environment, the pollution and waste of virtual space mapped onto the physical world, Digital waste, and the influence and change of human self and self-belief in the process of technological development. She hopes to express these existing or imminent problems from different perspectives through digital ways.

Jojo Zan creates immersive and interactive experiences with digital sculpture, AR, and digital filmmaking. She believes that art is a bridge that connects her with the external world, and she uses art to voice and express what she feels. Jojo's work explores the relationship between humans and the virtual world, and how humans are drawn to the virtual world while ignoring the impacts it has on the present and the future.

One of her projects is called “The Digital Legacy”, which is a digital sculpture and AR installation that imagines a future world scenario where the virtual world has taken over the real world, leaving behind ruins of human civilization. She was inspired by Buddhism, ruins, and the sacred monuments of ancient Rome, which reflect human beliefs and how they change over time. She uses digital sculpture to create realistic and detailed models of the ruins, and AR to overlay them on the real environment, creating a contrast between the past and the future.

Her goal is to awaken the forgotten persistence in everyone’s heart by letting them explore the ruins in the virtual world through her work. She wants to challenge them to think about their relationship with the virtual world and the real world, and how they can balance them. If the future will be a ruin, how can we change it?

The Digital Legacy - (Mixed reality film) – Time: 00:03:35

The Legacy Tower – Group portraits.

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Mixed reality film

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00:03:35

`“man” (as embodied memory) effectively becomes obsolete.”

`Humans become information itself.

`Double-layered garment structure with CLO3D that acts on the human body, with a circular outer layer and a tightly wrapped garment that links the inner layer.

8th-wall augmented-reality blender clo3d digital-amber digital-fashion post-humanism

Relic tower design – The ruined tower below is an expression of the body abandoned by consciousness, along with the discarded electronic components smoothed constantly by nature, unable to break free.

Character sketches – They are men and women, animals and objects, Buddhas and gods. They represent human beliefs and fears that people once loved but abandoned and, in the end, abandoned their bodies.

Two girls being fused together, the peeling skin and melted bodies gradually buried in the rock, with the fibre optic cables attached to the high places, still unextinguished.

The man opened his hands to catch something, but he had forgotten how much he had lost.

Is it a deer? Is it a puppy? Or some ancient creature...but it doesn't matter what it is in the weathering...

In the history of civilisation, humans have never abandoned their faith. The god at the top, meanwhile, is the faith that represents technology, such as AI, the robot. It serves as the closest image to amber, to express the change in human beliefs.

`What if.. Digital monuments in the real world ？ – I am planning to use the AR monument format to build and place a relic tower in each place, a monument that connects the virtual and the real, a silent record of what has happened in the times. I hope that people will feel the resonance of memory, nature, survival and history.

AR design – Next, I started the AR part, I wanted to use ar to make it easy for everyone to use their mobile phones to interact with each other in a clever way between the real world and the digital world.

I used 8thwall, a web-based AR software, to create my AR, which supports position tracking and thus enables my vision of drawing virtual objects from physical objects.

artificial-intelligence augmented-reality digital-sculpture mixed-reality post-humanism relic

Jojo-Shuhan Zan

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Royal College of Art