Xiaoyi Ni

Networked：A decentralised state of information sharing.

Visual：relating to seeing

Metaphor：A cognitive model that creates new understanding through conceptual blending.

Number 1: A symbolic figure composed of the digits 0 through 9

Number 2: A representation of various abstract systems, such as time, value.

This project explores how visual metaphors can restore

the non-linear cognitive structure often lost in language.

While linguistic metaphors tend to flatten meaning into “A is B,”

visual metaphors can hold multiple directions of association simultaneously.

By constructing a networked metaphor system

—where no single concept is the center and each node shapes and is shaped by others—

this project investigates metaphor as a decentralised cognitive tool.

Numbers become the medium:

visually uniform yet semantically diverse,

they bridge abstract systems like time, value, and ranking.

Through them, networked visual metaphors emerge not as inventions,

but as hidden functions already embedded in how we perceive and structure the world.

Numbers accumulate presence by converting appearances into countable units.

From then on, time became a sequence of units—minutes, seconds, countdowns.

Our lives turned into cycles of numbers,

ultimately reduced to two dates on a gravestone: a beginning and an end.

Numbers assign positions to entities within an ordered and referential structure.

We began to search for things as if flipping through a dictionary:

which number means wealth, which means poverty,

which number is lucky, which is not.

One number marks your address, another marks mine;

one is you, another is me.

Numbers differentiate and homogenise—

and in the end, they help us forget the complex systems behind them.

Numbers enable standardised abstraction by transforming qualities into measurable units.

From then on, everything could be measured—

value with money, intelligence with scores.

We began to apply the same ruler to things that were never meant to be compared.