Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy has been used as the source for a new alien-looking sculpture by Chinese artist Wang Yuyang. Yujang’s Identity is 20 feet tall and composed of folded layers of various materials including brass, copper, iron, fiberglass, concrete, marble, and steel—all interwoven as arcing contours that look both organic and like some otherwordly samurai armor.
Photo:Barney Hindle©2016 CASS Sculpture Foundation, Wang Yuyang, Identity, 2016.
Beyond its striking form, what’s remarkable about Yuyang’s piece is that, when you look at it, you’re actually looking at the text for Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Yuyang converted the words themselves into binary code, then visualized it all using 3D rendering and modelling software, which determined the material, the color, and structure.
Wang Yuyang, Identity, Proposal Rendering, 2015 © Cass Sculpture Foundation, Wang Yuyang.
For Identity, the binary code was input into 3ds Max and a 3D printer for a visual output, with the program “reading” the order of the text to form the installation.
“The shapes of the sculpture are the twisted rectangles or circles function in the program,” explains Yuyang to The Creators Project. “The title of the work is also a selection by the computer (selected from a dictionary pack when we ‘save’ this file) and the color by reading the code again.”
The idea, says Yuyang, is to give the making over solely to the computer so it can objectively visualize the text. While Marx writes about how exploited labor underpins capitalism, Yuyang hands the labor of the creative process—outsources it—over to automation.
“It shows my curiosity with these texts,” notes Yuyang. “Das Kapital has been grouped into different chapters when I was reading it in school. Different chapters are taught in primary, elementary, and high school, it’s the topic of exams [in China]. The book was with my generation all the time when we were growing up. So I am deeply familiar with it and now I would like to see it differently. Turning it into a visual work is a different way to look at the text again.”
Full Story at The Creators Project. Wang Yuyang’s website is here.
Neato! Of course, interpretation in this form is more difficult than words, but it’s a striking visual representation.
rq:
I think so too. I’m fascinated with the idea of translating text to binary then to a 3D sculpt. I’d like to do with with so many texts!
I can’t help but wonder what you’d get if you started feeding binary holy books into a computer.
A mess of nonsense? :D
Well, yes, but a pretty mess of nonsense!
That, yes!