SHA-BE is a virtual creatures generator.

It will will generate virtual creatures of different forms and behaviors in a virtual space according to the name given by the user.

In this work, the user creeates a virtual creature by giving a name. The name is used to obtain a Hash value through a SHA256 algorithm, and based on this value a unique virtual creature is generated. The virtual creatures interact with each other in the process of collision and combine with each other to form the next generation of cirtual creatures. User use iPad to input a name and use VR devices to enter the virtual world.

Through this work, I want to explore the self-evolution of the virtual world and the realtionship between data and humans in posthumanism. And I believe VR is an important doorway to post-human society.

Basically, I want to build a virtual world full of different virtual creatures, and I want to link these virtual creatures with people. So I came up with the idea of social media, which can be seen as a virtual world in which virtual characters are created by people by creating accounts. So in this work, I go through the names to generate different virtual creatures and link these creatures to the person who gave them the name. The little frame in this work is a window, a window between virtual world and physic world. User can use iPad to scan the frame to peer into the virtual world through this window and put on the VR device to enter the virtual world.

At the same time, these virtual creatures in this virtual world will not be controlled by people to self-evolve. They will generate a new individual by merging names and inherit some characteristics from the previous generation. Just like machine learning, which is widely used nowadays, we train a model to get a result that satisfies us, but we don’t know what happens during this process of data transformation.I believe this will happen more and more in the future, where algorithms and data will iterate and evlove themselves in the virtual world. And our real world will be more and more closely connected to the virtual world.

The ideas of virtual creatures shapes was inspired by Karl Sims’s Evolved Virtual Creatures(1994) and about the virtual creature self-evolution this point I refer to the game of Spores(EA 2008).

To discuss post-humanism through Virtual Reality is the main focus of my work. In my work I want to express not only the format of “transhumanism”, but also to give our bodies a virtual organ through Virtual Reality, so that we can gain a new perspective and rethink the relationship between human and technology.

What is ‘post-human’? It may be considered as a viewpoint/perspective with the following hypothetical characteristics. …… First, the post-human perspective values (informational) data forms and downplays (material) factual examples. Consequently, concrete images formed by biological substrates are seen as historical contingencies rather than life-giving necessities; secondly, the post-human perspective sees consciousness/conception as a mere contingent phenomenon, like a nouveau riche that is constantly developing and ascending, trying to exaggerate a secondary show into an entire performance. And the long Western tradition, before Descartes considered the ego to be the thinking mind, treated consciousness/concept as the center of personality (human identity); again, the post-human view holds that the human body turns out to be all prosthesis that we have to learn to manipulate, so that the use of another prosthesis to extend or replace the body becomes a continuous process, and that this process begins long before we are born. Finally, and most importantly, the post-human perspective arranges and shapes humans in one way or another so that they can be tightly linked to intelligent machines.

– How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles

Through the slightly obscure discourse, we have a vague sense of logic: the essence of the world is information rather than matter, as in molecular biology, the human body is seen as an expression of genetic information, and humans are essentially information patterns or information systems (e.g., money is an information pattern stored in a computer bank rather than real cash), and the shift from information bodies and cyber bodies to post-human body, which is a general trend. “If you think that the universe is made up of information in essence, that means that these ‘creatures’ in computer programs are ‘life’ because they have the ‘form’ of life ‘, i.e., the information code. As a result, the theoretical basis used to classify all types of life has undergone a major shift.” Virtual Reality for me is a small hole through which I can get a glimpse of the possibilities of post-humanity.