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Brain Island: Neo-Existentialism

Xi Li 李曦:  Brain Island: Neo-Existentialism, 2019

2019 /Full HD Video/ 1920x1080/ 11'54"

The process through which individuals construct their sense of self is an ongoing act of negotiation, transformation, and self-fashioning. Artistic practice becomes a space for examining how identity is formed, questioned, and reconstructed through personal experience and external forces. In an era defined by technological acceleration and cultural instability, this work asks: how do we understand ourselves when the boundaries between reality, representation, and simulation become increasingly uncertain?

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This experimental essay film explores contemporary existential questions through the lens of identity formation in hypermodern conditions. Rather than presenting the self as a fixed entity, the work examines subjectivity as a constantly evolving process shaped by perception, memory, technology, and cultural narratives.

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Inspired by Anil Ananthaswamy’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, which investigates the relationship between consciousness, neuroscience, and the sense of self, the film adopts a fragmented analytical structure that moves between scientific inquiry, philosophical reflection, and personal introspection. Through first-person narration, moving images, sound, text, and digital interventions, the work explores the instability of identity and the construction of selfhood.

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Combining glitches, animation, 3D computer-generated imagery, virtual environments, and documentary fragments, the film creates a hybrid visual language between reality and simulation. Personal memories, symbolic imagery, social narratives, and performative elements intersect to form a cinematic space where utopian aspirations and dystopian anxieties coexist.

Xi Li 李曦: Still frames from Brain Island: Neo-Existentialism, 2019

Click to view Brain Island Project

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