Yuting Zhu
i won't pack lightly for my trip to mars
"If you had one night to go through the things you hoarded in life and decide what to pack for Mars, what would you spend the night on?"
This video installation documents hoarding behaviour in common people as a persistent effort against the algorithmised cultural environment in China, where pieces of possession, speech and identity are prone to being censored, obsolesced, and erased. Participants are invited to film themselves packing and narrating the stories behind their collected items. An AI model is trained to perform object recognition on the footage and crop the items away by a random code-generated rule. As a response, the artist then prints out the remaining images fills in the hollow boxes with resilient bodies. Framed as a dig site of two empty suitcases, the installation captures the disruptive power of an algorithm and its inadequacy to preserve. With all the things left unpacked and memories unsaved, it all feels like a perpetual rush.
Flo is an independent performance maker, who seeks to explore new forms theatre with digital technologies, moving images, urban settings, and community experiences. Her recent works often address themes around intimacy, witness, and fragmented perception of the self, in an abiding effort to initiate alternative ways of seeing.
