02 The Machinery Of Desire : Monument to the Colored Dream
Installation / Project Mapping / 2025
Artist: Jess Chen / Sarah Zhao / Boning Yu
Music: Wanderlust By Bochum Welt
The Machinery Of Desire takes street-side hair salons in China during the 2000s as its point of departure. Through the juxtaposition of physical installation and moving image, it examines how hair dyeing, styling, and visual appearance became ways for ordinary people to construct identity, desire, and self-image amid rapid urbanization and the expansion of mass media. Centered on a modified chair as the core installation, the work combines everyday objects, projection, and light to create a space shaped by consumer culture and visual desire. At the same time, AI is used to place the installation into urban streets and hair salon scenes from the 2000s, producing a mockumentary that adopts the language of documentary film while pointing to a form of historical memory and imagined reality jointly constructed by media and technology.
AI is not used to “recreate” the 2000s, but to produce a form of memory that feels unreliable. The physically existing installation chair is placed into past scenes that never truly existed, yet appear familiar, allowing it to seem as if it had been filmed, documented, and verified. The mockumentary format itself is a contradiction: it imitates reality while constantly exposing its own artificiality. As AI begins to participate in image generation, the boundary between documentation and fiction becomes increasingly blurred. The images that appear to come from the past are neither archives nor memories, but imaginations reassembled through technology. This instability is essential—it reminds us that images of the past, and memories of “real life,” have always been shaped by media. If the 2000s marked the moment when ordinary people were first extensively illuminated by television, advertising, and popular imagery, then today AI simply pushes this condition of being seen and rewritten into another stage.