Human Body Is a Donut and an Empty Box

Video, 4'52", 2024
[Personal Project]

<Video Editing>
<3D Animation>
<Visual Programming>
<AIGC>

This video consists of two chapters:

The first chapter introduces a new definition: "Human body is a donut." It explores, from a topological perspective, how the physical body constrains human existence and how humanity seeks to escape these limitations through self-reconstruction.

The second chapter focuses on the "body" in the digital world, analyzing the materiality and limitations of computer image. It reveals that digital objects are still limited by material rules, challenging the notion that digital spaces are infinitely free and omnipotent.

[Screenshots]

[Making]

3D Scanning

generating video with stable diffusion

filming with green screen

[Script]

1

2

[starts

I bought a donut, and ate it.
The donut is now in my mouth, my stomach, my intestines. The donut is now inside my body.
Yet the science teacher would say, wrong. Only when it is broken down into small molecules and enters the bloodstream can we say that the donut has entered our body.
Food enters from one end and exits from the other, travelling through the long long tunnel of the digestive system.
Inside our bodies there is a through hole.
Topologically, we are equivalent to the donut we eat.

Yet, there are still ways to escape.
Through piercing, we create more holes in our bodies.
Self-destruction becomes a means of transformation and escape.
In the instant when a needle pierces through two layers of skin, we leap from the loop that encapsulates humankind.
When Jesus descended from the cross, he became a five-holed being.
When a bullet passes through the head, the single-holed form disappears.

A well-known gif shows that a donut and a coffee mug are topologically the same thing.
Such morphing also occurs between males and females.
between the elderly and the young, between White, Black, and Asian, between those with one leg and those with two.
In the domain of topology, all humanity is the same.
We are a mass of flesh with a through hole; we are a through hole in flesh.
We live upon this hole, continuously swallowing and reshaping.
We are trapped within this hole.

We carry these hidden holes as we move among humans.
So hidden that one day the hole consumes hole, and flesh consumes flesh.
We can make the holes larger, bigger, immense.
Then, in an instant, the hole will suddenly vanish.

ends]

[starts

Now, as we return our gaze to the center of the screen, what do we see?
Is it a donut, or is it my body?
We are staring at a 3d model composed of data, rendered into a 2d image through rasterization.

I use the 3D model as a representation of my body because it seems to be flexible, malleable, and meets all the demands in my narration.
Just as people projecting and mirroring everything into the digital world
Transferring consciousness into a space which knows no boundaries and cannot even be called a space, and forgetting thee existence of the physical body.

The body of digital, the body of spirit, and the body of flesh and blood are all dynamically constructed.
All the bodies are pierced and pinned by the hole in the name of topology, twisting and writhing upon it.
At the very beginning of time, when all things were still low-poly models, God created Lara Croft, and her enormous triangular breasts.
An additional two subdivisions and two side faces made a human into a woman, and always a woman since then

I came all the way into the digital world and found everything so lifelike,
makes it hard to determine, whether my consciousness, is housed in a body imagined as an empty box,
Or an empty box imagined as a body.

ends]

[Exhibition View]