In Lingfei Shen’s latest body of work, Intimacy.zip, the lines between technology, emotion, and embodiment collapse into one another. Initially conceived with digital interactivity at its core, the series now stands as a fine art installation of rigorous conceptual depth—immersive and sculptural, a confrontation with the architecture of contemporary intimacy. Displayed in its full tripartite form, Shen’s work advances beyond the realm of speculative design into a precise visual language that explores the translation of emotional experience into data systems.
Intimacy.zip is not metaphorical. It is an act of compression—of sensation into transmission, of human desire into algorithm. The title itself encapsulates the essence of Shen’s project: intimacy condensed, archived, and coded. Through her use of Arduino-based systems, translucent sculptural materials, and custom-built interfaces, Shen creates a poetic inquiry into how machine logic and biometric measurement can be embedded in the most private and vulnerable corners of human experience.
The first piece in the series, Kissing Simulator, centers on a biofeedback loop driven by the participant’s own heartbeat. The sculptural form—a resin object with fleshy contours and a haunting tactility—reacts with calibrated warmth and microvibrations. The intent is not to imitate the act of kissing, but to expose the dissonance between somatic sensation and mechanical reproduction. She brings the participant to the edge of affect, where the sense of being touched is divorced from human presence and filtered through code. In this act, Shen poses a conceptual challenge: when physiological data is extracted and returned through synthetic channels, does the emotional weight of intimacy persist?
The second piece, Long-Distance Affection Interface (also known as Sympathy Circuit), builds upon this foundation by translating emotional attention into light and motion through two interconnected components. The system comprises a wearable armband sensor and a head-mounted feedback interface—each worn by a different user. These interactive sculptural devices form a closed loop: the armband monitors states of focus or mental presence, transmitting data in real time to the corresponding headpiece, which subtly responds through shifting light and embedded motion. Shen describes this process as “visualizing absence,” where emotional connection becomes observable but abstract, rendered in ambient signals rather than direct contact. Shen draws influence from theorists like Eva Illouz, whose work deconstructs how intimacy is increasingly shaped by economic and technological rationality. Through Shen’s system, love does not disappear—it becomes legible. And in that legibility, something essential is eroded.
Although only the first two works from Intimacy.zip have been previously exhibited, a deeper engagement with Lingfei Shen’s practice—through her online portfolio and extended documentation—reveals a third and arguably the most conceptually charged piece in the trilogy: Synthetic Genesis (formerly Artificial Womb). Absent from the gallery space yet integral to the theoretical arc of the series, the work sharpens the inquiry at the heart of Shen’s exploration: how machines may not only mediate but come to occupy the terrain of human intimacy.
Synthetic Genesis manifests as a speculative wearable device, equipped with sensors that register environmental conditions—temperature, humidity, and light—and translate them into parameters for constructing a simulated, metaverse-based gestational environment. This imagined space hosts a fictional digital fetus whose virtual development is reflected through shifting light and feedback on the body-worn interface. The discovery of this work invites a reframing of Shen’s oeuvre—not merely as interactive media, but as critical design fiction.
As an artist, Shen does not resolve the contradictions she presents. Instead, she holds them in suspension. The participant is never entirely user nor entirely viewer; the interface does not resolve into function or metaphor. Instead, the system—like contemporary intimacy itself—remains ambiguous, partial, and recursive. From a critical standpoint, Intimacy.zip resonates with the theoretical frameworks proposed by Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. But Shen’s value lies not in citation but in transformation. Her sculptural interfaces enact theory materially. The notion of affect as code, of love as signal, is not described—it is performed. In doing so, Shen offers a new language of relationality, one that is at once technological and poetic, fractured yet precise.Intimacy.zip succeeds not by offering answers, but by illuminating the fragility of our present condition.

Through a series of installations that are as visually compelling as they are intellectually urgent, Lingfei Shen redefines intimacy not as an act or emotion, but as a condition of being coded.This is not a vision of dystopia or transcendence. It is a mirror to the present—fragmented, interfaced, and undeniably human.