We are delighted to announce Pete Jiadong Qiang has been selected for the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2020. His project HyperBody was selected by jury members Anita Jóri, Nora O Murchú, and Martha Schwendener.

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. 

For 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 in Berlin — 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. 

“(...) we can no longer see our bodies as things among other things in the world. We now see our bodies as mediations between ourselves and all the other things in the world. In fact: because all things are experienced by us through our body one way or another, we ought to make a map of our body before we can try to make maps of things in the world” (Vilém Flusser, Toward a map of the body).

For the jury, Qiang’s project resonates with theorists around queer utopianism and communities of hope. In HyperBody Qiang develops a strategy for revitalisation in order to create discourse around resistance and the rebuilding of worlds — a needed political gesture within our present political moment. 

The residency program is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin.