Undo Human

Human society is composed of rules. In the modern era, rules have gone extreme—as if they have lost touch with our intrinsic nature, shifting from guidance into a structure that risks depriving our humanity. Undo Human began from this tension: when laws, norms, ethics, and rationality are no longer protective boundaries but become a mechanism that privileges some lives while suppressing others.

The research framework draws from the historical structure of “quarantine” and confinement—how societies repeatedly build systems to define, exclude, and regulate what they label as irrational. The work traces how such structures persist across centuries: from institutional control to ideological exclusion, and into contemporary forms of political deprivation and public “cancellation.” In this view, “civilization” can become a kind of madness—not because reason fails, but because rules expand until they justify harm and dehumanization.

Rather than treating “animality” as the opposite of humanity, the project positions it as part of humanity: instinct, wildness, irrationality, rebellion, and desire are not errors to be eliminated, but forces that keep bodies organic and alive. The work asks why modern rules become “mad”: many rules are created to systematically legitimize egoistic actions, producing extreme consequences while claiming moral order.

Formally, the installation translates this research into a participatory condition. Rope becomes the central metaphor: rules as invisible lines that only become “real” when a body engages them. Entering the space, each participant faces a choice—either to align with mycelium (mushroom) as a symbol of untamed, non-hierarchical nature, or to approach a wheel that displays socially constructed desires: wealth, success, power, beauty, fame.

This system is not staged as punishment but as revelation. The entanglement is slow, procedural, and undeniable: a rule is not experienced as rule until it becomes bodily. The installation proposes that liberation does not come from replacing one rigid structure with another, but from opening up the possibility of non-hierarchical growth—connections that spread in multiple directions, like rhizomes.

The project includes material and biological prototyping to test this “realm of nature.” Mycelium was chosen in response to matsutake mushroom—an organism that resists artificial cultivation and remains independent from human control. When environmental constraints made a large-scale mycelium structure difficult to realize, the prototype logic was preserved through material substitution, using natural silk to imitate mycelium’s connective presence.

Undo Human ultimately asks a simple, bodily question: when a human enters this installation, do they have the right to choose to live authentically—or will they be entangled by the rules that promise safety and success? The work critiques the extremity of dehumanizing modern rules while proposing a different form of life: opened-up, connected, and resistant to domination.