The Foolish Old Man Project

《愚公计划》THE FOOLISH OLD MAN PROJECT

An artwork shown in the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \Architecture (UABB), Shenzhen, China

An Documentary of The Foolish Old Man Project, LI Ruixuan, ZHANG Mengni, Film Producer: WANG Ruonan, 2019.

The Foolish Old Man Project is a commissioned work to the 2019 UABB. The sci-fi story in the work was inspired by my memory of the hometown and my deep interest in the prehistoric maritime civilization of the Pearl River Delta Region. Based on the idea of discovering early civilizations, I created the concept images, and then we constructed a story in which our modern civilization is going to be discovered by future humans.

We set the background of the story in Year 4989’s Futian CBD, which is also the location of the exhibition. The purpose of “The Foolish Old Man Project” is to transport the resources from the ancient Rebar Mountains to the surrounding sea cities through the ancient tunnel. The project’s researching ant teams “Kua’e” are named after the giant ant gods mentioned in the Chinese fable “The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains.”

The light boxes in the installation are a metaphor for the artifacts unearthed by the researching ant teams in our fiction, as well as their ancestors’ prototypes for creating the social algorithms of swarm collaboration and the total managing artificial intelligence “Swarmind.”

We try to use this work to “recreate” the scene of researching ant teams’ investigation on this land in the future. The audio of the installation includes collaborative conversations between the two teams, which was recorded in a way of poetry reading. The video simultaneously displays the “ancient” information collected by the ant teams. In the story, the ant teams gradually went through the awakening of sentiments and individual creativity during the serious and rational archeological exploration.

The multimedia installation includes texts, illustrations, recorded dialogues, footage, performance, as well as images generated under the cellular automaton logic.

Many visitors were curious about the on-site performers and tried to talk to them. However, they were supposed to keep silent throughout the experimental practices. The audience had to negotiate among themselves to interact with the work, so as to find clues, to contemplate, and to understand the project.