Artist: Zhang Weidi – https://www.zhangweidi.com

Fantastic Shredder – the magnetic field, 2018

Fantastic Shredder is a Virtual Reality experience simulating the mechanism behind a paper shredder and reconstructing the shreds of Chinese 1980s posters based on fragmented Chinese characters. In 1980s China began to implement economy reform and opening-up policies by which modern Chinese commercial posters took on a new face with a surreal and saturated representation of daily objects.  In this project, hundreds of 1980s posters are collected as raw visual data, processed digitally, and translated from 2d imagery to 3d animated models. Spatial narrative is created by fusing aspects of algorithmic behaviors of objects, symbolic visual information, aesthetic expressions of machine, experimental sound, and interaction between immersant and the virtual space. This project addresses William S. Burrough’s ‘Cut-up technique’ with contemporary approaches. It results in a state of disequilibrium that engages narratives,  which can be interpreted as an immersed dialogue between reproduction of semiotics and machine.