Entangled
Xueyan Ma
In the current era, humans increasingly exploit nature to improve productivity. The ideology of anthropocentrism will imperil every living thing to extinction. This thesis seeks to utilize the nonanthropocentric perspective to create a speculative paradigm to challenge human dominion and redefine the human-nonhuman relationship. In this paradigm, humans are placed in a naturedominant world. Instead of modifying nature to meet their ever-growing demands in this paradigm, humans modify their demands in order to survive within the limitations of nature. This paradigm aims to provide humans with a perspective to understand the entanglements with nature and the Anthropocene.
This is the capstone project in support of my thesis, which is designed for poetically narrating
the entanglement between human and nature in the Anthropocene. I want to explore the
creation of creating an immersive ambience in an outdoor space by utilizing different visual
elements, such as performance, typography, and digital art.
The first part of my capstone is a typography response, which depicts the human-nonhuman
relationship in the anthropologic development. The content comes from the book, “Sapiens: a
brief history of Humankind,” which describes the process of human development: We appear,
evolve, survive, spread, settle, sanctify, produce, sacrifice, invent, consume, and become
extinct.
In collaboration with the typography response, the second part is a digital art composition that
uses Processing, which includes a 3D tree, a 3D hand, and a Thank you plastic bag. The
interactivity among these objects helps delineate the relationship among human, nature, and
artificial materials.
The last piece is a performance. The performer wears plastic bags in a nature-dominant
environment. When the performer comes into this place, the performer decides to modify herself
to survive within the limitations of the environment instead of using her dominion to change it
into a cozy shelter.
