a project from LI Xuechen 李雪琛 and Shanshuo 单硕
Through this work, we hope to deepen people’s impression of the connection between decay and rebirth. Our project has an experimental phase and a design phase. We used the experiment stage to understand in first person the experience of decomposition and regeneration, and in the design stage, we embedded reflection and analysis by the display of photos, audio and video, and records from the experiment.
In the experiment, we used different methods to decompose substances and materials, such as putting the same organism into different Petri dishes to see how it would differently react. We used a UV lamp to irradiate a piece of meat and seal it as the control group. Then the experimental group used three methods over a time span of 14 days to observe the decay: the meat was soaked in glycerin, meat was left in the open air, and the meat was left in alcohol. At the same time, we also carried out the same experiment on vegetable leaves, potatoes, and other materials. The experiment showed that the meat became sour, smelly, hairy, and black, emitting a lot of gas, while the vegetable leaves almost disappeared, and there were many plaques. At the same time, we try to cultivate new life. We have successfully cultivated mushrooms, and we have still cultivated new varieties of mushrooms with rotten pork, potato and soil after separating the materials used to cultivate mushrooms.
In the second stage, we determined our way of expression, and we kept our original intention: to show the decay and rebirth together to the viewer in a visual way. Therefore, we use the soil that can be used to grow mushrooms as the basis, put the rotten objects on it, and use two different environments to tell the same thing, so as to form a connection. We hope that people passing by can see the difference of each time period. At the same time, we made a clock in a more direct way. It is the decay of the same object at different stages, from 0 to new life. We hope that the audience can understand abstract concepts through the environment and equipment we build.