Uploader, 2025

In Uploader (2025), Zheng Da explores how technology fuses with the human body to form a new kind of subject. Drawing on Katherine Heller’s theory of the “expressed body” and the “reappearing body,” the work uses a robotic arm and laser to translate these ideas into motion. The arm performs sequences that combine endurance-based, repetitive gestures drawn from labor with movements that echo daily life—stretching, sneezing, small pauses—and then extends beyond human limits through anti-joint rotations. The laser becomes both information and touch, refracting through mirrors and prisms to blur precision with chance. In this interplay of mechanics and memory, light acts as an extension of the body, a visible thought connecting machine and viewer. The robot’s gestures are purposeful yet tender, greeting passersby with curiosity and reminding us that even the most engineered forms can carry something human.