Different Bodies, Different Myths

MA Interaction Design — UAL, London College of Communication

What are the myths told about our world, ourselves, our bodies, other bodies? What are the myths we tell about the past, and how do they influence the new myths about the future? In this exhibition from students of MA Interaction Design at UAL’s London College of Communication, 22 new works of interaction design explore these questions and others to present new ideas about the possibilities of life, and how other lives are possible. These works reflect on eternal questions such as our relationship to death, sexuality, and the natural world, as well as future-facing ideas around AI, the “Metaverse”, and the future of cities — all the while referring back to myths, bodies, and the possibilities for other worlds they present.

Digital Wishing Device

Ziyue Chai (CN) 

The project aims to explore whether digital wishing can replace traditional wishing as a new model of wishing in the future as the digital consumer age develops.

Jadism

Yijia Liu (CN)

Jadism creates a space that merges musical and visual elements to explore the transformative history of jade worship, emphasizing the religious status of jade culture in China. The videos on each side of the installation show the changing ways jade has been worshiped both in the past and the present.

Petro-Culture Pipeline

Qing Qin (CN)

Through fieldwork, data collection, chemical experiments and real-time image generation, the project exposes how oil, as a raw material, is involved and hidden in our history, culture, and everyday life.

Where are you From

Adnan Naqvi (UK)

Where Are You From is a desktop performance that aims to investigate the destruction and reconstruction embedded within the latent space of experience that surrounds borders, citizenship, and migration in contemporary Britain.

AI helps you stop slacking off

Kaixiang Yang (CN)

This is an interactive installation. It is a surveillance system with AI. The aim of the work is to create an AI model that can monitor employees and push them to work hard and not slack off. By allowing the audience to participate in the training process, they jointly decide how rigorous the final AI model will be.

A.V.A. Investigation

Dalida Raad (LB)

A.V.A Investigation is a neo-noir narrative game about AI bias in policing and judicial systems. The objective is to solve the murder and issue a correct arrest warrant.

Future Web

Wen Li (CN)

Future Web is an interactive VR film that imagines a future virtual community built on blockchain, crypto currency, and non-fungible tokens that ushered the era of Web 3. The video tries to ask following questions: Can the technologies that underpin Web 3 guarantee a decentralized virtual world?

Fragments of Uncertainty

Yulia Babanova (RU)

Fragments of Uncertainty is a video art piece exploring the existential yearning for certainty and predictability in an increasingly volatile and fragile world.

Artificial Life: One Leg at a Time

Yue Haung (CN)

Artificial life: One Leg at a Time is a multi-channel screen installation that exposes the often-hidden workings and funny moments of supposedly successful AI-based Unity ML-agent. The clumsy and amusing training process shows the fragility and the immense amount of slow and ponderous computation behind successful AI.

Logging Off

Elliott Hall (UK)

Logging Off is an interactive installation, which through the medium of a chatbot confronts the audience with their own mortality, encouraging conversation and acceptance of our death anxieties. The mid-2000s desktop aesthetic aims to create a sense of familiarity and comfort throughout the experience.

2084

Shuo Wang (CN)

2084 is a dystopian interactive fiction inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. The topic of the project is that when human memory and consciousness can be transformed into data storage, those who own these data will have the right to modify the personality and memory of digital humans, and even modify history.

Endless Chapter

Lin Chen (CN)

Endless Chapter is a sound installation that shows how rape has become a tool in Africa, a weapon of war directly linked to the exploitation of minerals. Yet our insatiable demand for electronics such as mobile phones and laptops increases the incidence of sexual violence.

The Fault Line

Yili Zhao (CN)

The project takes fragments of the artist’s family history back to a hybrid space where a simulation of the actual environment and imagination of the missing archive are established. It shows the artist’s practice as resistance to the disconnection of memory between generations and attempts to discuss the missing archive, not as an absence but as a presence that can be examined.

Psychic

Yue Wang (CN)

The installation is built upon a generative Tarot deck system made with GANs. Both being seen as a mysterious black box process, Tarot divination and AI-created arts are juxtaposed to provoke speculation on AI’s self-awareness, creativity, and politics.

The Earth

Yuying Wang (CN)

The Earth is an interactive ceramic design, which makes reference to the traditional Chinese ceramic type ‚reverse pot,‘ made by Northern Song Dynasty Kuan Ware. The project produces spiritual rituals between audiences and the Earth at the consciousness level.

The Orchid

Xinyun Huang (CN)

The Orchid (2022) demonstrates a hybridized virtual plant, generated by GANs based on the symbol of sex and the orchid in visual form. The project serves as a commentary on how we gradually forget about the orchids’ materiality.

Haneen

Thana Alharbi (SA)

Haneen (2022) is an experimental film about a third culture kid persona who is struggling to find their own identity and differentiate who they truly are from all the different ideas and culture they picked up in their early childhood.

What is Left Behind?

Hooria Sanei (IR)

What is Left Behind? is a multi-media installation converting unspoken words into sounds. The project reflects upon the philosophical understanding of time and considers how human words function as a metaphor for what we leave unsaid.

Winner Winner

Qiao Ye (CN)

Winner Winner (2002) is a simple and fun game for two people. The audience competes for first place in the game through simple interaction. The theme of the project is to make people aware of how systems influence our behavior by showing the framework of the game system that puts people in a competitive mindset.

Her Monologue

Yuanyuan Xu (CN)

A fictional story about a Chinese woman who is accused of cheating and is domestically abused by her husband. Focusing on Chinese social media, Her Monologue uses marriage as a metaphor for the internet, a digital panopticon shaped by patriarchal discourse.

Samsara

Yuwei Jiang (CN)

Samsara* (2022) challenges the socioeconomic frameworks woven within our optimism about gender equality. By allowing each audience to become digitally reborn as a female in the program based on their life choices, it draws attention to the parallels between the myth of meritocracy and the myth of progress, asking us to reconsider the power dynamics in the future tense.

Fejka

Delayne Sternbeck-Rutter (AU)

Oscillating between cellular and planetary impact, potentially lethal microplastics (MP) are imperceptible to the senses. Fejka 2022) seeks to make this invisible phenomenon visible, connecting data on MP from Aalborg University’s 2019 study to everyday objects, consumer habits, and the corporate agenda of neoliberal capitalism that give rise to the growing microplastic problem.

Biography

UAL is a world Top 2 university for art and design according to the QS World University Rankings® and Europe’s largest specialist university for art and design. UAL’s London College of Communication school is a world leader in creative communications education, through our industry-focused courses in Design, Media and Screen.