HyperBody: Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

During the month of October, transmediale and the Vilém Flusser Archive (UdK) had the pleasure to host London-based Pete Jiadong Qiang, the Vilém Flusser Resident for Artistic Research 2020. This year the residency took place in a hybrid form, combining a month of virtual residency in September, with further development  on their arrival here in Berlin in October.

In their artistic research, Qiang explores cultures within VR, fandom, and ACGN (Anime, Comic, Game, and Novel) communities to discuss and exchange ideas, and to experiment with transformative queer practices.

For the residency Qiang developed a maximalist HyperBody game level, called Vampire Squid or, to use Flusser’s term,Vampyroteuthis Infernalis.

Inspired by Flusser‘s writing on fictional bodies and his ideas around skin, space, and sexuality, the game level creates an abstract cosmos of fragments of bodies and materials. 3D scans of spaces, cartographies, and surfaces in London and Berlin, are remixed into multiple worlds within the game engine. The result is a complex spatial ethnographic archive.