Yunling Wu
About
Yunling Wu is an artist and visual experimenter often working with experimental videos and data-based digital animations who enjoys wandering through the world of digital landscapes, finding logic in the natural world, and searching for natural aesthetics in logic.
Previous Education:
BA Software Engineering, Digital Media Technology, 2015-2019, Xiamen University, China
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Statement
My passion always revolves around nature and technology, language and thinking, humans and non-humans. These grand definitions seem to have neat boundaries, but the subtle connections between them gradually form my universe.
My practice utilises systematic models, using a variety of digital tools and media, such as video analysis, animated simulations, programming, building data sets, and other future developments, to find invisible dimensions of information that are hidden in the surrounding environments.
Beginning from the Linguistic Relativism hypothesis, which suggests that our present language shapes our worldview and cognition, I keep weaving the thread of connections between language and imagination.
In my explorations, the definition of language is expanded and reconstructed. New ways of thinking are emerging, as new structures are uncovered and constructed. How to break down existing limitations and our narrowing of attention, how to challenge the boundaries of our perception of the world, and how to see beyond the horizon. This is what I am looking forward to.
Beyond Language
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With the perspective of imaginary science, Beyond Language shows the construction of a nascent language system that spans living to non-living entities. Through the analysis of object tracking data, from observing birds in flight to plants dancing, from the interstellar to the microscopic, the project uses algorithms as tools to find instances of communication with a unifying quality in which all things coexist. Everything, from the inner universe to the outer universe, everything is moving in slow motion. And these threads of movement, which wrap us - human and more-than-human — tightly together.
How can we access the language that are beyond-the-human? Beyond language gives its own definition. Language and thinking are closely linked, and it is beyond language that we can think beyond the human.
Medium: Experimental Video
Size: 00:08:34
Plant Whisper
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Plant Whisper is a collaborative research project with plant artist Wanlin Jiang, focusing on the visualisation of plants dancing in the wind. (2021–Present)
We have adopted the following working principle:
Collection of images and information - Analysis of movement points - Output of dynamic records - Collation of static visualisations - Archiving - Experimentation with derivative art forms. (Based in Guangdong | China and London | UK)
Curiosity, observation, documentation, and archiving of the natural aesthetics embedded in the plants themselves was our starting point, but in one interaction after another, our consideration of the relative relationship between humans and plants continued to evolve. What do these beautiful poetic and mysterious symbols mean? Are we using human concepts to decode the language of plants in a way that we think is correct? There are still no answers yet. Rather than being the answerer, we offer the perspective of the questioner in the hope of evoking a little thought in the viewer.
Medium: Multimedia
Size: Various
In Collaboration with:
- Wanlin Jiang
Wanlin Jiang (Fatking) is a Chinese plant adventurer who is currently majoring in visual communication at RCA. The study of plants through visual communication and the stimulation of the audience's thinking about the relationship between humans and nature are the core of her works.
Typeface: New Wave
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Inspired by the uncontrollable lack of information and the gaps in time that exist in the wireless mode of information transmission in network technology.
Medium: Experimental Typefaces
Size: 00:01:34
Model of Practice: Iteration
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Model of Practice: Iteration is a summary and documentation of my own practice patterns before I started Beyond Language. It references most of my work during my studies at the RCA and presents a third perspective on how the work has evolved from one iteration to the next.
Voice-over describes my experience of the similarities and differences between the concepts of practice, experiment and iteration. What is the one thing that remains the same over countless iterations? And what is changing?
Now, a new iteration has begun.
Medium: Video
Size: 00:09:00