Man Who Conquered The World From His Apartment

This installation reveals the room of a man who conquered the world in a war simulation game using the machine he invented. He grew up under a collectivism, and patriarchal education and was surrounded by the grand narrative imposed by the media and the Chinese government. As an idealist, he believes in the value of the dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and sees it as the only way to self-accomplishment. Pressured by the gap between the great dream and his poverty-stricken reality, he was eventually driven insane to realize this dream.

Perceiving the world map as a representation of political powers, this man developed an artificial intelligence program that turns anything it sees into a map for the game of conquest called RISK. While the machine operates based on a graphic matching algorithm and a printer, it matches color areas and objects in the input images with the reality and game world region’s shape in the dataset.