Siran Liu

This project envisions a fictional space: a simulated paradise in which humanity has regressed to an infantile state. Here, figures known as ‘giant babies’ drift through currents of desire like parasitic organisms, constantly extracting resources from others to sustain their illusory sense of self. This utopia is the ultimate manifestation of ‘nipple entertainment’—content that is cheap, instantly gratifying, and highly stimulating, yet fundamentally shallow. Cloaked in soft textures and saturated colours, it masks its extractive and numbing nature while gently eroding the capacities for perception and thought.

Within this maternal-like system, infantilised emotions, behaviours, and identities are not only tolerated but rewarded as evolutionary advantages. Individuals no longer strive for growth but instead choose regression, adapting seamlessly to the cradle of comfort that surrounds them. They cling to one another, imitate each other, compete for attention, and indulge in meaningless pleasures—becoming perpetually immature figures circulating within the digital sphere.

Parasitic Roaming uses symbolically charged character animation to visualise this phenomenon. Through digital simulations and exaggerated bodily metaphors, it explores ‘collective infantilization’ as a deep-rooted mechanism of cultural and spiritual regression in contemporary life. This is not only a satirical portrayal of human behaviour, but also a critical dissection of the desire-driven landscapes shaped by media society.

The hand is among the oldest instruments of meaning. Long before written language, we touched, shaped, signaled, and resisted with our hands. Gestures—those brief, often unconscious movements—carry with them a density of cultural, emotional, and political resonance. This book explores gestures not simply as bodily actions, but as socially constructed expressions shaped by time, context, and technology.

While language is often considered the primary mode of communication, gestures operate alongside and beyond speech. They encode values, hierarchies, identities, and ideologies. From the ceremonial wave to the subtle flick of a wrist, from tools that mould hand habits to symbols of silence or revolt, gestures reveal the deep relationship between the body and its surroundings.

Structured into four thematic chapters—Cultural Gesture, Constructed Hands, Hidden Hands, and Gesture & Languages—this book moves through disciplines including anthropology, design, semiotics, and visual culture. It highlights how gestures are shaped by ritual and routine, mediated through objects and screens, and performed both privately and politically.

In an age of accelerating visual communication, to understand gestures is to decode the body’s role in meaning-making. This project invites readers to see the hand not as a static symbol, but as a dynamic site of expression and cultural memory.