Qihang Sun

About

Qihang Sun is a digital artist and fashion designer who reconstructs futurism from an anthropological perspective. His work is based on the human-centred concepts that he follows as a designer, and the philosophical ideas about identity that he has developed over his years in the fashion industry.

Beyond Post-humanity

Who the hell are we? Where are we going? As a self-proclaimed higher being whose vehicle is a carbon-based organism, whose organs evolved by natural evolution to perceive this world, and whose language is the basis on which its civilisation is constructed, do we have any other driving force above the Absolute Truth other than the will to survive? How do we feel the connection of everything natural on this planet to us? I feel that scientific modernity, in bringing so-called modernity to our civilisation, has robbed us of our own original sense of this, and we no longer dance around a campfire with our faces smeared with mud like a primitive tribe. These are definitely not symbols of backwardness in my eyes, because scientism, which stems from a one-sided sensibility and is based on empiricism, is itself a narrow dimension of civilisation, and it will run into bottlenecks as a civilisation in its own right. And primitive religions are not instruments of group domination in the full sense of the word, but in a deeper sense a reconstruction of our senses. By examining our language and civilisation in the context of a re-critique of the senses, we can see the multi-dimensional imagery and diversity of the distant future, and we can stop obsessing about the grand unified theory of physics, and about the use of language to establish a scientific scale for explaining all appearances. We should consciously understand the dilemma of thinking as human beings, and critically examine the narrowness of ourselves, modern civilisation and empiricism in relation to the distant future. What kind of beings are the super-future humans, the civilisations beyond post-humanity? Do they still have the same will to live as we do? These questions point to that never-ending quest in the vastness of the universe —Sein und Zeit.

Based on this reflection, Qihang proposes a hypothetical-carbon cleansing that transcends post-humanity. As carbon-based organisms ourselves, our existence is an accident in the universe, a transient and small form of existence, and in the entropic evolution of the universe on such a large scale the carbon-based form of life is bound to be erased. This is the first stage of my vision – post-humanity, one day this creature at the top of the food chain will also face an existential crisis in which biological evolution will not be able to cope with the environmental changes, and all our organs will be replaced by machines that have a wider capacity to acquire information, store more information, and operate more efficiently with instructions. However, except for the brain, which provides subjective will, the entire civilisation relies on energy and information to survive, and human beings are both anxious about their future and proud of their existence as the masters of the universe. The second stage is the post-transcendent human being, where the brain, as a carbon-based organism, will be unprotected and disappear, and a bunch of systems made of ores, metals, chemical dyes, and so on will be aggregated and operated in an orderly manner like a space station, which is born from human beings but is not carbon-based human beings any more. I don’t know if the concept of silicon-based life will be the complete result of this vision, but there must remain in this Norse Universe a system of ordered matter from the past based on the standards of mankind that operates eternally on a driving force. This future is so mysterious and distant that we don’t even know what the future will be after our own selves, our bodies, have disappeared into thin air, and even if it is created by man, will this eternally functioning ordered system still be the continuation of human civilisation? In addition to being the carrier of our own biological will, we must also have an internalised form of existence that is incomparably spiritual, what Lacan called ” Angoisse“, what Heidegger called ” Angst“. Maybe the never-ending quest is the meaning of our own existence.

IG：billcipiran

EMAIL：billcipiransun@gmail.com