The Weaver Girl Project 织女计划
The Weaver Girl is an interdisciplinary project that investigates the artificially-made emotion of love. It is currently in the phase of preliminary R&D.
The Weaver Girl was initiated on a Qixi (the Chinese Valentine’s Day). It was born amongst the maze of “pick-up lines” produced on dating apps and ad campaigns. For most of cosmopolitan men and women, the iconic story of the Cowherd Boy and the Weaver Girl has long lost its poignance as it has been turned into something extremely flat. At most it is the background picture of an ad during the Qixi shopping mania or at most a meme. In the past, there might still be people look forward to the meeting of the two lovers on Qixi and recite the poems about the story. Today, no one is “lying down to see the cowherd star and the weaver girl star” any longer. After all, any star is lucky to be seen beyond the heavy pollution above the city.
What vanishes along with the story is the soul of the story — “eternal love”. In this world, love is the key for us to escape the mundane and daily life into the sublime and the epic. Love with an adjective of “eternity” is even more so. It places human emotions upon the scale of cosmos. When it comes to actual daily life, narrative as such barely survives. Nothing lasts forever. It almost says that the more eternal something is, the less it actually lasts. The narrative of “eternal love” oftentimes appear in romantic novels, rom-coms, commercial films with big IP or mobile games. It often begins with a QR code for payment or a 60 second ad and terminates when the computer window is closed or the machine is turned off.
To some extent, the birth of The Weaver Girl the performance piece is initiated by the death of The Weaver Girl in the traditional narrative. The piece is almost a digital afterlife of the narrative, attempting to re-weave this “moving love story” in an unlikely space.
Photography / Wei Ding
Visual / Sen Xiao