Yuguang Zhang
What is human, what is not human, what is in-between? (Non-)Human is an art installation that conjures the hidden human-ness in objects and imagines a speculative world where a human exists in non-human forms.
Description
We live a life surrounded by objects we build to serve us – curtains, lamps, and many others. We use our body to interact with these objects – rubbing our face against warm towels, or sinking into a fluffy bed. We, as humans, rarely consider them to be part of us. We tend to think of ourselves as different – we’re the ones with spirituality, reason, intelligence, while they’re not.
Yet, objects keep our traces, like dents in our shoes, or the erased keys on our laptop. Objects carry our memories, like an inherited music box, or a bowl with the smell of mom’s favorite recipe. Objects also shape us either physically or behaviorally: it a scar from a knife cut; or a spontaneous “sorry” when we bump into a table. All of these suggest a possible deeper connection between humans and objects, which we don’t notice on a daily basis.
The advancements in modern physics have pointed out the similarity between humans and objects in terms of materiality. Emerging technology such as ML / AI has shown the promise of non-human intelligence through computation. More than ever, the borderline between human and object has become blurred. My question is if there is a spectrum that measures the level of Human-ness vs. Object-ness, what lies in the middle ground? How close might an object endowed with a certain level of intelligence or consciousness be to a human? As a response, my thesis project (Non-)Human is a series of art installations — a bedsheet, a mask, and a camera — that explore the semi-human, semi-object territory by creating humans in non-human forms. In light of the pandemic, I created the initial piece of this series which is a bedsheet that tweaks and bends in the form of its owner, now up and out for the day.
Classes
Thesis Part 2: Production