stuck in the motherboard
2023Architectural Masters thesis
Royal College of Art, studio ADS4 led by Tom Greenall, Matteo Mastrandrea & Nicola Koller
Film premiered at Cloud Tales: Softer Digital, Copenhagen 2023
Thesis awarded the Dean’s Prize from the School of Architecture, RCA 2023
(7 min)
The project Mimicry & The Villa of Mysteries is a cyborg re-analysis of ancient frescoes in Pompeii, Italy. Working with AI to generate new identities for characters painted in room 5 of the Villa of Mysteries, the work aims to translate our patriarchal histories to build new queer cyberfeminist perspectives that can live beyond the walls of the ancient fresco. In the film, Stuck in the Motherboard, one of the women is an artist who is trapped inside of an egg-shaped computer that that she sees as her mother. She reviews her life as she speaks towards her mother in the computer womb, gazing at the fractal stream of screens surrounding her.
As a queer asian woman, the designs take on elements from personal experience. The Kneeling Woman wears a cheongsam and exists in a hyper-real fluid dreamscape of screens showing different versions of herself reflects on personal experiences being mixed but wanting to find a sense of belonging to my asian heritage, and feeling more connected when existing online. The project explores the softscape of the digital and the opportunity to feel connected to all aspects of your identities on the internet. It is a visual investigation into how we can critically perceive our digital identities and design new spaces for our gender fluid, transversally thinking, physically-transcending bodies to exist.
