In the context of contemporary immersive media, Qupei’s 2024 visual performance series distinguishes itself through profound interrogation of digital aesthetics and real-time interactivity. Her practice, spanning Chengdu, Xinjiang, Tokyo, and London, cultivates a unique visual lexicon across diverse cultural and technological contexts: transmuting sonic language into kinetic visual narratives while deconstructing spatial and sensory experience through rigorously improvisational interaction models. Her 2024 performances transcend mere spectacle, evolving into migratory, monsoon-like experiments where boundaries dissolve in refractive light—from dawn moisture in Xinjiang’s Euphrates poplar forests to Thameside twilight in London.
Ephemeral Ecosystems: Glitch as Temporal Catalyst
The artist deploys custom shader systems presenting mutable distortion fields at Chengdu’s Echo Live and Xinjiang’s Anka & Qupei Techno Live. Projection-mapped glitch artifacts respond to live audio inputs through WebGL-based particle physics simulations, creating
0.2-second latency feedback loops. This technical framework renders each performance a site-specific singularity – unstable visual metabolisms resisting algorithmic preservation.
Tokyo: Algorithmic Memory in Flux
Collaborating with Swing Dance and Botanist Live Tokyo, Qupei layers archival Shōwa-era street scenes (4K upscaled from 8mm film) with interactive neon abstractions. The latter, evolving from her London series’ RGB value sets, manifests Wolfgang Ernst’s “archival delay” through real-time pixel displacement. As historical footage degrades under algorithmic interpolation, the work materializes digital capitalism’s paradox: nostalgia reconfigured as an unstable present.
London: Deterritorializing the Digital Body
In her Thames-side experiments, Unreal Engine 5.2 infected morphing microbial landscapes from Leap Motion-captured gestures. Architectural grids dissolve into Deleuzian “bodies without organs” – virtual physiognomies glitching at 24fps/48fps alternations. This frame rate schizophrenia, referencing Brazilian Carnival’s kinetic excess, attacks the hyper-digitalized era’s identity fixation through calculated visual hemorrhage.
Xinjiang: Sensory Epistemology of Rupture
The Twelve Muqam Constellation Grammar installation erodes art’s neoliberal frames via olfactory-tactile invasion. Within 10x20m handwoven carpets under silk canopies, audiences navigate space permeated by fermented mare’s milk aerosols and vibrating subwoofers (20-40Hz). Rooted in Mongolian gal (nomadic campfire) rituals and multi-generational ger (yurt) gatherings, this sensory weaponization produces participatory knowledge exceeding audiovisual hegemony.
Bleeding Interfaces: A Manifesto
While mainstream immersive art fetishizes 16K resolution perfection, Qupei’s corrupted code performs Ryoji Ikeda’s critique of sensory capitalism. Her London prototypes demonstrate how GPU-overload artifacts (achieved through deliberate VRAM underallocation) can destabilize Hito Steyerl’s “bubble vision”. As she declares: “Perfection is compliance. We need machines that bleed.”
In an era of AI-generated homogenization, this practice poses its ultimate provocation: When every glitch becomes codified as “style”, can aesthetic hemorrhage retain revolutionary potential? Qupei’s answer emerges in her series Error Propagation tour – a distributed system where malfunction becomes migratory resistance.
