(no images downloaded yet)
# Project Description Inframince: Exploring the Physical–Digital Gap Qianru Yang Summary Final work College Central Saint Martins Course MA Graphic Communication Design Graduation year 2025 Inframince: A Personal Exploration In The In‑Between Of Physical And Digital: This project focuses on the often-overlooked yet tangible details in the physical world: the scratches formed over time on the surfaces of objects, the fleeting warmth left by a palm on a cup. These subtle but concrete traces are frequently compressed, blurred, or entirely erased during digitization. I became attentive to this subtle gap—my theoretical foundation draws from Marcel Duchamp’s (1930) concept of "inframince", a term he used to describe imperceptible distinctions, such as the warmth left on a chair after someone has sat on it, or the thickness of a shadow. I focus particularly on this inframince during transitions between physical and digital media—those nearly invisible traces, residues, noise, afterglows, echoes, or dislocations. My research asks: how do inframince transformations between the physical and digital worlds reveal qualities that are lost, hidden, or redefined in our material experience? Final work Inframince: Exploring the Physical–Digital Gap I explore the barely perceptible traces of “inframince” that emerge when physical objects and actions are digitized. Through a printed publication and a digital video, I examine how details are lost, hidden, or transformed. I combine scientific methods—drawing on physics and perception theory—to structure experiments, alongside intuitive, practice-led visual exploration, using repetition to reveal subtle differences. My personal exploration includes eight sets of exercises based on gestures, images, and interface behaviors. Each employs a different media translation mechanism to expose tensions between rationality and intuition, control and chance, representation and distortion. These exercises shift repeatedly between digital images and physical materials, emphasizing the “inframince” differences that emerge through replication, translation, and algorithmic transformation. Ultimately, I critique digital representation by returning to physical form, creating a conceptual loop from physical to digital and back to physical. The book format itself reflects this idea—its nonlinear, materially assembled structure exposes the evolution, rupture, and untranslatable residues of information. View Gallery View Gallery View Gallery I employ diverse media translation mechanisms in my research because, as the project progressed, a reflexive paradox gradually emerged: while I critique the representational loss in digital media, my very method of critique depends on digital tools. Ultimately, this digital critique returns to a physical form—presented through the printed publication, where the "inframince" produced in the transition from digital to physical media is reshaped and re-embodied. The expressive medium itself becomes part of the conceptual loop: physical → digital → digital critique → physical. View Gallery View Gallery View Gallery Research and process Repetition and Difference: Thinking through Gesture The entire film appears to continuously document the process of making dumplings across different media. Essentially, it serves as a metaphor for repetition and difference. What matters is not the act of recording itself but the way it reveals the unflattened differences through the process of documentation. Through the abstract interaction between gestures and food, the work suggests the fragmentation and reconstruction of bodily experience in the digitalization process. View Gallery View Gallery View Gallery Share this project Inframince: A Personal Exploration In The In‑Between Of Physical And Digital: This project focuses on the often-overlooked yet tangible details in the physical world: the scratches formed over time on the surfaces of objects, the fleeting warmth left by a palm... A link to this page has been added to your clipboard
# Links ## Official page - https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/641623/cover ## External - https://www.instagram.com/qaryqianru - mailto:roqary@163.com - https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F641623%2Fcover&text=Inframince%3A+Exploring+the+Physical%E2%80%93Digital+Gap - https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F641623%2Fcover&media=https%3A%2F%2Fportfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F06%2F03200410%2F%25E9%25A6%2596%25E5%259B%25BE1.jpg&description=Inframince%3A+Exploring+the+Physical%E2%80%93Digital+Gap