New Era Women | 新时代女性

Medium

Interactive Installation

Created with

Arduino, GPT, Blender, Python, Adobe Audition

Time

September 2023 – May 2024

Undergrad Capstone Project

Exhibited at

NYU Shanghai 2024 IMA Capstone Show, Shanghai, China, May 2024

Advisor

Bogna Konior, Jung Hyun Moon

“New Era Women | 新时代女性” is an interactive kinetic installation that materializes the complex relationship between China’s techno-economic aspirations and women’s labor through an automated AI-powered propaganda-printing and dough-sheeting system.

The piece begins as an AI system, fine-tuned with historical propaganda slogans from Chinese family planning campaigns’ period, generates contemporary pro-reproduction propaganda. These slogans are printed in iconic Maoist-era typography and vibrant red onto sheets of dough with a custom-built CNC printing system, symbolizing state authority. Audience can then engage in repetitive physical labor by operating a hand-cranked dough-sheeter that deforms and reshape these imprinted sheets. As the dough cycles through the system via conveyor belt, returning repeatedly for new impressions, it gradually transforms – its texture distorting and color shifting to pink, embodying the continuous exploitation of women’s bodies and labor. Throughout this cycle, a megaphone broadcasts an endless stream of propaganda, both real-life and AI-generated, creating an overwhelming atmosphere of state rhetoric.

By interweaving AI-generated content, mechanical processes, and physical labor, the project critiques how state authority, through its technological advancement initiatives and pro-reproduction propaganda, continues to extract dual forms of labor from women while diminishing their autonomy and needs. It reveals how China’s technological advancement paradoxically reinforces rather than liberates women from traditional burdens, while state rhetoric – now mediated through highly automated and digitized infrastructures – continues to dehumanize women’s reproductive roles.