Xiaofan Cao is a fashion designer, future thinker and medical researcher, who obsesses with prolonging human lifespan and biomedical science. With a background of fashion and textile design in University of Southampton, he establishes a hypothesis of future fashion and human lifecycle by way of his biological and digital fantasy. At the Royal College of Art, Xiaofan’ s main focus on an association of both cancer therapy and advanced human longevity enables him to build up a digital performance and microworld womenswear collection. In his digital world, he is developing a real-time animation of the possibilities in micro world comprising human, fluid metal, particle system and metallic histocyte in Blender. As a fashion designer and a future thinker, maybe fashion has a lifetime like humankind, or maybe it never goes to the end.
Xiaofan Cao
Her steps are getting faster, then suddenly stop, as something is blocked on the way.
Head turns to right and then back to front. It seems like she is searching for something.
Taking a few steps backwards. Gently, slowly, her hand raises across over the head, body is now getting twisted, twisted, twisted.’ ---‘HUMAN LONGEVITY’ CHAPTER 5
Imaging if we separate our fresh blood and cells at young age, raise them, feed them, and deliver them back when we get old. Is it possible to keep youth?
What if this immortal being invades into reality, it provides human a new form of life, or it brings irreversible biological extermination?
According to a cancer therapy, Xiaofan Cao translates his fantasy, his imagination into a script under the frame ‘I-WE-IT’. ‘I’ means individuality, physical body, skin, language. As a result, Xiaofan and his cooperator Nenghao He design three characters through replacing blood and eventually having mutations in gene, human hawk, human reptile and human snack. Xiaofan’ s performance is a poetic, beautiful metaphor to reflect how human gets mutation after replacing blood and cells.
As ‘WE’ and ‘IT’, they rely on each other, which means it will be a society, a symbiosis system. Xiaofan Cao plants fluidic metal under the skin to record how it provides dynamic stability to the microbiome and microorganism, a system supporting normal operation of body function. As opposed to what has been expected initially, it is growing in madness. Activated branches are covering veins, cells, dissociating upon the skin, which enable him to develop metallic world and particle animation.
Xiaofan is navigating between an obsession of prolonging longevity and micro symbiosis world, it is a challenge to the possibility that explore human life and science.
Medium:
Film
In Collaboration with:
Medium:
VR
Medium:
Film
