`   ❥~     TIANRAN QIAN    ✶.✩  

Exploring how to make space in this alien aesthetic machine~

Tianran is a transdisciplinary, research-based creative practitioner born in Hangzhou, China, and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work investigates the aesthetic mediation of digital writing, the materiality of artificial intelligence, agency and algorithmic affect, as well as space-making and community organizing practices. Her multimedia projects encompass independent publishing, photography, installation, writing, and workshops.

Professionally, she has worked as a digital talent agent and producer at the intersection of new media art and marketing. This role provided her with market-driven insights into how new media infrastructure shapes visual culture and value production, transforming urban fabric and public space.

MFA: Design and Technology
@Parsons School of Design, The New School

BA: Global Liberal Studies in Contemporary Culture and Creative Production
@ New York University


Research interests:
- computational aesthetics
- technopolitics of infrastructure
- digital writing as imperial technology
- (im)materiality and transmediality of digital media
- trasnlingual practice
- embodiment and affect
- image and value production
- human agency, space-making and creative intervention
- epistimology knowledge representation


Contact:
tianran.space@gmail.com
@_tianran_

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I saw too many cheetah print skirts in summer 2019...

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2019.06-10
Cheetah Skirt Book

Photobook, 500 iPhone photos of cheetah print skirts in 5 months
Cheetah print undoubtedly marked the fashion trends of summer 2019. This photo book comprises 500 cheetah print skirts I captured using my iPhone from June to October. Each page includes a screenshot of the iPhone photo information, serving to control variables and highlight the overwhelming quantity, thereby proving that I was the sole photographer and emphasizing the scale of the trend.

Wearing cheetah print feels different from wearing all-black. Animal prints are a sign of power, displaying the wearer's ability to conquer. In today’s pop culture, wearing cheetah print often suggests a sense of fierceness or sluttiness—two ends of the same gaze, both tied to power and force. When someone intentionally purchases and wears this print, it is a means of expressing one's personality and a sense of empowerment. However, this agency is heavily mediated by algorithms that predict and present content to us, shaping our present choices and future habits based on a coerced past. Otherwise, why would so many wear cheetah print skirts in the same summer?

This photo collection aims to illustrate that trends and aesthetics are manufactured, with capital and power exercised through our very fabrics. Our feelings and motions are abstracted into data, measured, controlled, and exercised on statistical populations through individual bodies. The book raises instead of answeing these questions: are we performing affective labor for platform algorithms in physical reality? How do we distinguish the thin line between proactive consent and passive coercion? How much agency do we really have in everyday choices?






The photos were categorized into 4 categories via trans-parent tracing paper: 
mini skirt, maxi skirt, mini dress, maxi dress.




Screenshots of each iPhone photo’s information, including time, location, and lens information.



To flip through the inner pages:

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