Jiaqi Yang

In this project I am working on 'invisibility', inspired by the German artist Hito Steyerl.

When I was thinking about how to represent 'invisibility', I focused on 'when I think I am invisible'. I think that the moment of emotional breakdown makes me feel invisible in the world. As I was working on my final project, my mood swings became more and more intense due to stress and panic as the deadline approached.

For this project I took photographs of deadlines in my life – sunsets, traffic lights, timetables at school – and I converted these images into base64 code because I thought the world was made up of code, making the images invisible to people directly. I then removed some random texts to reflect a moment when I was no longer visible due to an emotional breakdown. I also recorded the sounds on the images at that moment and removed some of the random sounds as well.

I believe that human life is like a code, one has to live and work within the prescribed time and rules in order to function, and when we experience some setbacks and emotional breakdowns, we are like these codes with some missing parts, resulting in not functioning properly.

With the covid-19 explosion, many people have been forced to change their lifestyles. It has also made a huge difference to my lifestyle, I used to love going out and socialise. But now I prefer to stay at home and just play games. So, I think there seems to be a lot more variety in lifestyles. Covid-19 has accelerated the introduction of virtual lifestyles into people's lives, and because of the internet and technology, it has also allowed us to work and live and keep socialising with friends during the outbreak.

During the epidemic, 'just dance' was one of the games my friends and I played the most, so it inspired me to design a weird 'dancing' 3D model that could interact with people in the virtual world. This is to encourage and remind people to be more social, to make life more diverse and interesting, and that the future of our lives is moving towards a new way of virtualisation.