Xiaoou Ji

Belgium (residence) °1996
research interests: Artistic research, Philosophy of technology, Critical-experimental game design, Installation Art, Meaningful play
affiliation: LUCA School Of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium
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Xiaoou (Olivia) Ji is a PhD researcher at the research unit of Inter-Actions, LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven (Belgium).

 

Her research looks at the human-technology relationship through a philosophical lens, combining insights from various intellectual traditions and forwarding the perspective of the artist-researcher as a new, complementary, ontological position. She experiments with the creation of embodied and multisensory art works, which refers to as installation games, creating a circular dialogue between artistic creation, philosophical theory, reflection on social phenomena and player experience.

 

 

research

research expositions

  • I Don't Know Who I Am (last edited: 2025) author(s): Xiaoou Ji This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    We live in an age of Symbolic Misery (Stiegler, 2014). In this era, we listen to the same music, scroll through the same Instagram feeds, and we immerse ourselves in daily lives that are the same as others, gradually losing the 'singularity (Stiegler, 2014)' of individual difference. This homogenized structure of perception continuously reshapes our subjectivity (Simondon, 1958; Hui, 2016), making individual desires no longer emerge from unique experiences or internal generative processes, but are increasingly induced and regulated by external technological and symbolic systems (Stiegler, 2015). In this context, the question is no longer 'What do we produce?' but rather, 'Do our desires still belong to ourselves?'. As Stiegler (2014) pointed out, in order to enter the market more effectively, marketing technologies have developed an industrial aesthetic system centered on audiovisual media. This industrial aesthetic re-functionalizes individual sensory experiences following industrial interests, aiming to produce a replicable and controllable unified taste through the standardized pleasure. This huge 'desire project (libidinal management)' manipulates human drives for externalization through a diversity of apparatus (Agamben, 2009; Foucault, 1977), generating a sense of 'participation' via formalized interaction, restricting the level of perception and expression (Stiegler, 2015). Through daily repetition, this process gradually weakens the individual’s ability for subjectivation, trapping them within a passive structure of desire (Stiegler, 2014). This exposition is based on an artistic research project titled 'I Don’t Know Who I Am', an installation game. It invites players to watch a five-minute monologue, the story of a cow (inspired by, for example, Lacan et al., 2001), to explore the secrets hidden within this cow’s desire. After watching the video, the player will face a plate of real grass with soya sauce, and be invited to make a choice: whether or not to eat the grass. This installation game encourages players to reflect on a critical question: At a time when industrial aesthetics and subjective experience standardize individual desire, is increasingly hollowed out, where do our desires truly come from? Do they still emerge from internal generative processes, or have they long been preconditioned and disciplined by technological objects and symbolic systems?
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