Qiang’s ongoing research embraces virtual and computational architecture to investigate new techno-Oriental contexts for queer bodies to inhabit and negotiate. These experimental landscapes offer the potential for connections across heterogeneous worlds made up of fragments of anime and gaming pictorial elements. In opening up these spaces for others to inhabit, Qiang offers speculative futures that are imbued with cultural values for the encounter of technological and artistic productions that reside within an Asian framework.

During the residency, Qiang will continue to develop this research in Berlin, conducting ethnographic studies of clubs, public spaces and queer communities. These studies will inform the development of an immersive landscape – a collectively inhabited environment opened through a queer lens that intends to politicise and disorient our understandings of the site. It not only challenges how we perceive the constraints and limits of our material world but also imagines other practices of sociality. In HyperBody Qiang’s Maximalist approach aims to redefine the space enveloping Berlin-based bodies through visual excess and the unfolding of multiple worlds of desire.

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.