Introduction
In the context of contemporary life, which highly values efficiency, individual perception is often dulled by repetition and expediency, and everyday actions are frequently performed unconsciously, gradually detached from the body’s authentic sensations. My artistic practice seeks to disrupt these automated states by creating experiences of absurdity, reawakening habitual behaviors that have been obscured.
As Camus notes, ‘The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.’ (Camus, A, 2013, p. 28) Here, absurdity as an artistic strategy that breaks conventions, rendering the familiar strange once again. In my work, reflective materials, mechanical movements, and sound interventions serve as key media, collectively constructing unstable viewing situations that prompt viewers to perceive their bodily presence in conditions of uncertainty. The aim is to reveal the ‘mechanisms of seeing’ embedded in everyday life—structural forces such as social norms and bodily habits that remain largely invisible—and to invite viewers to reflect upon them.
Question your teaspoons.
– Georges Perec
Reawakening Everyday Actions
In everyday life, I am consistently drawn to reflective materials, noticing the distortions they produce through the interplay of light and form. Seemingly ordinary spaces—bathrooms, underground, and buses—become accidental ‘theatres of reflection’.
Showerheads, taps, and hand dryers no longer function merely as utilitarian objects; they appear imbued with a gazing power. In these surfaces, I encounter my own face rendered blurry, distorted, and sometimes unfamiliar. These refracted images, at once familiar and estranged, seem to remind me that ‘seeing’ is never unidirectional; it also reflects back upon myself.
Since arriving in London, I have become acutely aware of the ubiquity of ‘reflection’. Unlike in China, where I previously lived, convex mirrors are embedded throughout markets, underground, and buses (Fig. 1). Their presence has led me to recognise that even in the absence of CCTV cameras, we still inhabit an environment of being observed. This subtle mechanism of watching has reconfigured my own perception: I have become conscious of how space and objects continually shape the body’s awareness of itself.
It is within this heightened awareness that I have begun to re-examine the daily rituals of my own body. The enclosed architecture of these spaces has sharpened my sensitivity to the relationship between body and space. While showering, I observe how water traces a path from head to toe across the skin, eventually converging and vanishing down the drain, the drain cover reflects fragments of my body. Seated on the toilet, I contemplate the simple, repeated gesture of pulling toilet paper. Amplified by the very configuration of the space, these mundane, repetitive bodily acts appear at once absurd and profoundly tangible.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed that ‘one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy… has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget.’ (Merleau-Ponty, M, 2004, pp. 6-7) What he termed the ‘perceived world’ (le monde perçu) is not the external, objective world, but a field of experience where body and consciousness are intertwined. Consequently, ‘rediscovery’ means returning to our most primordial and direct contact with the world—to explore how we truly ‘see’, ‘hear’, and ‘feel’ the world, prior to any scientific explanation. And what I have rediscovered through these minute bodily acts is precisely that layer of perception which is so often obscured by the habitual rhythms of daily life.
Absurd Interventions: The Generation and Transformation of the Work
When perception is reawakened, new questions inevitably arise: how can such awareness be embodied, enacted, and shared? I therefore employ ‘absurdity’ as an artistic strategy to disrupt everyday habits, reawakening the body’s sensitivity to its own existence.
During the initial phase of my creative process, I employed TouchDesigner to produce the interactive video work Tangible Deformation Intangible (Fig. 2). Driven by real-time data, the imagery undergoes continuous distortion, reconfiguration, and delay, forming a dynamic representation of the ‘self as seen’. My choice of digital medium was motivated not only by my background in computational arts but, more significantly, by the inherent ‘programmable contingency’ of digital systems. This very quality embodies a malleability of perception—transforming the process of sensing from a fixed visual representation into a generative, dynamic experience.
The second work, What I Talk About When I’m in the Shower (Fig. 3), continues this line of exploration, focusing on reflective materials and multisensory interaction within the bathroom environment. I employed hand-tracking technology to simulate the gesture of ‘wiping away steam’. As viewers wave their arms in front of the camera, a fogged, blurred screen gradually reveals a complete human face, accompanied by the synchronised sound of friction on a mirror—as if their own movements were uncovering a hidden self. This mechanism of multisensory linkage transforms the act of viewing from a purely visual experience into one of embodied participation.
As my practice developed, I began to recognise that the screen medium, to some extent, isolates the body from perceptual experience. Consequently, I sought to extend digital logic into physical space, allowing the installation itself to become a materialised medium of perception. At this stage, materials became the starting point of my thinking. Mirror paper, Mylar film, and inkjet silver film drew my attention with their distinctive reflectivity and mutability. I regard materials not merely as formal tools but as generative entities, echoing the insight of anthropologist Tim Ingold. (Ingold, T, 2013, p. 31) Through processes of touch, refraction, and deformation, materials generate new meanings.
Meanwhile, my perception was reactivated by the everyday gestures within private spaces—drawing curtains, flushing the toilet, or pulling toilet paper—seemingly mundane and unconscious acts that in fact encode complex relationships between the body, social norms, and self-awareness. The bathroom, as a space commonly regarded as the most private, both shields the body from external gazes and reinforces self-surveillance. Within this intimate environment, actions that appear free are already internalised forms of external power. For instance, the habitual act of flushing away bodily waste represents a socialised response of erasure, marking one of the deepest imprints of how we are shaped into ‘civilised’ bodies. Likewise, in the act of pulling toilet paper, the body no longer needs to think—‘where is my hand, how should it move’—because such gestures have formed a subconscious schema of the body: a set of operations performed without thought, where social norms have sedimented within the corporeal.
My Toilet Diary series seeks to reveal the hidden normativity embedded in everyday actions by documenting and reconstructing those seemingly ‘useless’ yet repetitive gestures that take place within the bathroom space. In Toilet Diary 2 – Toilet Rolls (Fig. 4), I replaced toilet paper with mirrored paper, posing an absurd question: what would happen if toilet paper were made of a reflective surface? When viewers encounter this substitution, the familiarity of a daily gesture is disrupted, prompting them to re-perceive the relationship between body and object through a mixture of awkwardness and curiosity. The mirrored surface transforms what is typically a private bodily act into an experience of being ‘reflectively observed’, carrying a subtle inquiry into the social norms that structure such behaviour. Rather than offering direct criticism, the work generates a light and humorous form of reflection, allowing viewers to sense the disciplining of bodily behaviour through a gentle absurdity.
This strategy was further extended in my later series Toilet Diary – the shower knows about me, where mechanical devices and sound became crucial media for reorganizing perception. The work consists of four interconnected installations, each taking folding doors, drains, shower equipment, and sound as its key motifs to construct an experiential ‘bathroom narrative’.
The interactive installation Touch-sensitive Interactive Sound Door (Fig. 5) creates a relatively private, semi-enclosed space that separates the interior from the external environment. The outer surface of the door is covered with Mylar, a highly reflective yet not entirely transparent material that produces subtle distortions and blurriness when reflecting the viewer’s face and body. When the audience lightly touches the sensors on the door, the Arduino module triggers a delayed playback of shower and ventilation sounds. This design was inspired by the everyday gesture of pushing open a folding door to enter the shower—a seemingly meaningless routine action that, within the installation, is magnified, reconstructed, and transformed into a perceivable event.
In The Drain installation (Fig. 6), I intentionally disrupted the natural downward flow of water—a movement usually effortless and unnoticed. Using an infrared sensor to control a servo motor, the mirrored drain cover slowly opens as the viewer approaches; when they lean in out of curiosity, tangled strands of hair are revealed inside. At that moment of looking down, what the viewer confronts is not only the visibility of waste but also the return of their own disciplined bodily experience.
The Toilet Diary series is an artistic response to ‘what is hidden’ and ‘what is overlooked’. Through the interplay of mechanical feedback, sound delay, and reflective materials, these installations construct a multilayered perceptual structure that allows viewers to experience the subtle relationships between body, space, and power within the dynamics of seeing and being seen.
Creative Approach and Influences
My artistic practice follows a method rooted in sensation and experience. This approach is not a predetermined logical framework, but rather a continuous movement between perception, material, and technology. Through practice, I have come to realize the importance of the absurd in this process.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault proposes that modern society shapes the ‘docile body’ through pervasive disciplinary mechanisms—individual habits, postures, and rhythms have long internalized the logic of power. (Foucault, M, 1977, pp. 136–138) Within this context, the absurd becomes a ‘deconstructive tool’: by amplifying, displacing, or repeating everyday gestures, it exposes the hidden disciplinary logic embedded in ordinary life. In doing so, the viewer becomes aware of the subtle tension between body and society, and is prompted to question the taken-for-granted order of daily life.
This strategy aligns with the tradition of absurd art that has evolved since the twentieth century. From Dadaism to performance art, artists have persistently challenged social norms and institutional boundaries through acts that are useless, humorous, or illogical. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (Fig. 7) subverted the sanctity of the art object through a urinal, while Joan Jonas employed mirrors, concealment, and bodily gestures to construct fluid relationships between self and other transforming the act of seeing itself into a process of questioning (Fig. 8).
In my creative practice, a distinct evolution is evident across my body of work. Initially, I employed digital interactive forms, but under the influence of Johannes Langkamp and Rie Nakajima, my focus gradually shifted toward mechanical installations. Langkamp explores the collaboration between mechanical structures and cameras, using light, reflection, and rhythm to construct subtle sensory experiences. For instance, his work Het drieDimensione vlak (2024) (Fig. 9) reveals the relativity of seeing and the fluidity of visual perception through simple mechanical motion. Nakajima, on the other hand, often creates sound installations using everyday objects such as motors, spoons, plastic bottles, and stones—as seen in Air Recycle (2024) (Fig. 10)—to awaken the viewer’s tactile, auditory, and spatial awareness. Their attention to ‘useless gestures’ and ‘low-tech mechanisms’ has inspired me to explore how simple materials, and mechanical actions can generate delicate and poetic sensory experiences.
It is thus evident that absurd interventions constitute an effective methodological approach. By creating a controlled disruption, they loosen the disciplined body and fixed patterns of perception. Absurdity here is not merely a subversion of logic or a critique of reality; it more actively provides a form of perceptual training, aimed at reawakening the body’s inherent sensibilities.
Ultimately, this creative research establishes absurdity as a gentle yet powerful artistic strategy. Rather than relying on overt confrontation, it employs creative estrangement to render the ordinarily invisible contours of habitual behaviours and social norms perceptible. The core value of this methodology lies in its capacity not only to offer a critical examination of the social structures underpinning everyday actions but also, in the process of deconstruction, to rediscover the agency and potential for resistance inherent in the body within established ‘mechanisms of seeing’. This research lays a solid theoretical and practical foundation for my continued exploration of sensory experience and interactive mechanisms.
Images
Marcel Duchamp. (1917) Fountain [Sculpture]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) (Accessed: 3 November 2025).
Joan Jonas. (1969/2024) Mirror Piece I & II [Performance]. Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/9420 (Accessed: 3 November 2025).
Johannes Langkamp. (2024) Het drieDimensione vlak [Kinetic sculpture]. Available at: https://johanneslangkamp.com/growing-archive/het-driedimensionale-vlak (Accessed: 3 November 2025).
Rie Nakajima. (2024) Air Recycle [Installation]. Available at: https://www.rienakajima.com/_work/_installations/Air%20Recycle.html (Accessed: 3 November 2025).
Bibliography
Camus, A. (2013) The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin Books, p.28.
Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin, p. 210.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004) The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. London: Routledge, pp. 6-7
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, p. 31.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, pp. 136–138.
About the author
Ruting Wang is an artist and designer based in Wuhan, China or London, UK, working in the media of interactive art, installation and sound. Her practice explores the relationship between bodily perception, reflective materials, and private space. Ruting Wang graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, MA Fine Art: Computational Arts in 2025.
Check her research on: https://rutingwang12.cargo.site/