FLUID IDENTITIES is a design intervention that manifests in the form of a DIY-service Fluid Mask and a public initiative. Together, this work invites people to engage with the mask as a mass-produced symbol and a site for individualized customization and performance. This initiative interrogates the centralization and interconnectedness of surveillance capitalism as well as contemporary identity overload, all the while recognizing fluidity to be a presumed agentic human condition and a widely-acceptable social factor.

  
As the main artifact, the Fluid Mask is a physical interactive face interface that contains 1 window and 2 displays to give people agency altering between representations of identities. Directly confronting society’s entry points, it first looks at identity's context-specific fluid legibility that reduces the whole set of personal identification data into the partial and only presents these parts as necessary and sufficient within themselves. Apart from that, it also mediates the larger ontological concept of fluidity as a vessel into daily interactions by isolating out the respective “identity signals”, using self-expressions to confront the utilitarian sense of identification.

  
Along with the mask, the Fluid-Identities Initiative also proposes a Manifesto that states the following - In a society where biopolitics deprives individuals of the inherent right to identity’s self-autonomy and where people are punished for not seeking enhancements, the intervention of fluid identities breaks the widely presumed normalizations by deconstructing labels and dichotomies. Above all, it recognizes identities to be fragmented yet authentic, and incomplete but sufficient.

Fluid Identities

“Run” is a music video clip with the full version of the song [here](https://soundcloud.com/lplusm/run-instrumental). The song is a conveyance of authentic thought and passionate emotion about the idea of “existential being” and living inside the moment.

The emergence of Calendar can be traced back to human’s innate desire for structures as a necessary social condition. However, the development of Calendar also led to a culture of toxic efficiency and "Calendarized" augmentations, as well as a lack of serendipity. In this film, we want to propose heterogeneous ways where Calendar can coexist with us. As we all relate to this ambivalence towards structures, how can our love-hate relationship with Calendar be reflected in a post-Calendar future?

Coexistence

_The Absurdity of Consuming_ is a music video based on [one of my songs](https://soundcloud.com/lplusm/the-absurdity-of-consuming) that has the theme of consumerism. Getting my inspiration from reading Marx’s critique of capitalism, I tried to explore human’s relationship with objects and how we tend to associate the term “value” with monetary definitions instead of valuing things inherently.

  
In the music video, I used the film languages of surrealism and symbolism to externalize and exaggerate human emotions. I put masks on actors to personify the commodities we are facing in everyday life, and I tried to imitate human beings’ internal struggle with them. To me, the absurdity of consuming comes from this: on one hand, we try to free ourselves from the trap of “things” and wish to value them without society’s definitions; but on the other hand, it is quite inevitable that our desires are naturally driven by them, and that when we consume, we somehow feel happy. The larger theme is that it is difficult for human beings to eventually escape society’s constructs.

The Absurdity of Consuming

This piece presents Dunne & Raby’s idea from their book Speculative Everything, and how the most valuable design intersects the zones of the plausible and the probable. It represents a physical mind map of the authors’ intellectual process. It also follows the train of thoughts and shows my response to this idea - while one side of speculative design is really innovative and inspiring, the other side might involve giving designers too much overarching power that could be dangerous.

Convergence of the Speculative

Body-Shifter imagines a speculative scenario where human beings are granted the superpower to freely shapeshift their gendered body parts. It is a radical response towards gender neutrality, imagining a post-sexual-identity world where one can abandon the constraints of biological sex and fully take control of gender as part of their social identity.

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Melody Ling