Xiaoxing Chen is a multimedia artist and researcher based in London and Glasgow, studying at the Royal College of Art for an MA in Information Experience Design. Prior to this, he completed his undergraduate studies at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He specialises in the use of interactive installations and moving images to explore social issues.
He is also a service designer and product designer, committed to creating socially impactful services and products.
The womb has long been a symbol of nurturing life and preserving the human bloodline. Today, as reproductive technology becomes more sophisticated, human reproduction does not have to be completely dependent on the womb.
If, in the future, human and even cyborg reproduction becomes completely independent of the womb and human and cyborg offspring are conceived by machines, or even by segments of code, how will the future womb mimic the human womb? How will it emulate the natural experience of human pregnancy? How will it sustain the continuity of culture and blood relations?
The project revolves around these issues and seeks to propose and explore future possibilities through the use of narrative, performance, sound and installation.
The story is set in the year 2122, when human society is gradually being interfered with by highly intelligent robots. Robots no longer reproduce through their mothers' wombs, but through reproductive chairs.
The story revolves around the main character, MegA24-7, and a chair, an extraordinary chair that acts like a womb and provides a safe cover. MegA24-7 knows that this is where she was born and the chair knows her very well, as it reads and organises her data while she sleeps and even deletes some unimportant data.
One day, when MegA24-7 tries to destroy the reproductive chair, it collapses and the next morning the same robot creature slowly opens its eyelids, "Good morning MegA24-8, are you sitting comfortably?" the chair asks.
In the story, when the reproductive process is initiated, the mother's body does not 'die'. Instead, the body is inherited by the offspring, while the mother's consciousness is replaced by that of the offspring.
The humanistic exploration of robotics towards segmentation is an inevitable trend, and as the continuation of civilisation depends on reproduction, exploring the future of robotic in vitro reproduction in this context helps humanity to build thinking about reproduction, an installation that explores how the cultural environment we live in affects us at birth and what we are given while we are inside the womb.
In the novel, the future reproductive procedure is carried out on a reproductive chair. The installation uses the reproductive chair as a vehicle to suggest the possibility of future reproduction through a dynamic installation and multiple screens. The reproductive chair monitors and analyses the cultural activities of the parent and controls the retained human cells in order to obtain the genetic information needed to pass on to the next generation once the reproductive process has been initiated.
This work aims to suggest future possibilities while exploring what gives meaning to reproduction and what it is that we need, by blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the non-artificial, the father and the offspring.
