By Adi Berardini
In the world of DIRD, narrative glitches behave like corrupted files—flickering, freezing, and repeating themselves. Stories unfold, collapse, and reappear across shifting landscapes, building what they call a cyclical apocalypse: a world where endings are never final, and the possibility of an alternative future flickers in and out of view.
Formed by Rui Shi and Zijing Zhao, DIRD works at the intersection of stop-motion animation, sculpture, and moving image. Their practice is rooted in the logic of animation—an understanding that movement and transformation are not just techniques, but philosophical conditions. “All cinema is animation,”[1] Alan Cholodenko once remarked. DIRD extends this proposition into a world where myths, ruins, and spectral bodies refuse to remain still.
Hand-sculpted forms appear alongside digital models; web-based interactives are layered with hand-painted textures. A single puppet might be sculpted from paper, its fragile limbs flickering in stop-motion, only to be re-imagined as a digital avatar wandering a frozen, browser-based mountain. In this sense, animation is not a tool for reproducing life, but a mechanism for conjuring it—a way of activating matter, generating illusion, and testing non-linear time.
DIRD’s ongoing project Mountain of Flames (2020–ongoing) embodies this philosophy. It builds a burning world shaped by Eastern funerary culture and the legend of Princess Miaoshan, a figure who defies patriarchal authority, dies by fire, and reincarnates as the bodhisattva Guanyin. In DIRD’s retelling, Miaoshan’s body is constructed from paper: unstable, flickering, fragile. She collapses and reassembles in endless loops, as if trapped inside the broken machinery of myth itself.
This myth is not retold for fidelity, but dismantled and recomposed, becoming a structure for queer worldbuilding and cyclical regeneration. The project has expanded across multiple works: Mountain of Reincarnation (2020), a browser-based 3D landscape where viewers must wait through endless loading loops; and Miaoshan (2023), screened at Goldsmiths CCA, where gestures falter and images stutter, producing an unstable visual terrain. In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.
If the apocalypse in DIRD’s cosmology is ongoing, their new work asks: what keeps producing it? Increasingly, they turn to the worlds of videogames, not as fans of gaming culture, but as critical observers of its embedded structures. For DIRD, videogames often encode patriarchal and violent logic: war as the default narrative, technological advancement as a weaponized drive, progress defined through domination.
In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.
Their next project, provisionally titled Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, examines how digital spaces rehearse violence again and again, simulating crisis as both entertainment and control. Battles are repeated, maps are drawn, and borders between self and other are endlessly re-inscribed. In these systems, the apocalypse is not an accident, but a design principle.
DIRD does not seek to replicate gaming aesthetics in a literal sense. Instead, they extract its logics—loading screens, glitches, respawns—and bend them into queer, feminist, and monstrous imaginaries. If games produce war, DIRD asks how art can produce peace, not through naïve utopia, but through speculative failure, haunted spaces, and monsters that refuse to play by the rules.
Central to this vision is the figure of the monster. In DIRD’s works, monsters are not villains but alternative bodies—hybrid, excessive, and non-binary. They inhabit the cracks of collapsing worlds, carrying with them new ethics of survival. For the duo, monstrosity is a form of magic: a way of suspending the violence of dominant systems and opening portals into parallel dimensions.
In their upcoming installation, these monsters are imagined as guardians of a counter-world, holding open a protective “enclosure” where war and technological violence lose their grip. Within this fictional spell, destruction is not the end but a threshold. Fiction itself becomes a weapon, or perhaps more accurately, a healing device and an imaginative structure that interrupts violence by inventing other ways of being.
This is not escapism. It is a critical use of fantasy, what they call “ruinous worldbuilding.” By constructing spaces that flicker between collapse and possibility, DIRD positions fiction as a necessary tool for confronting the real, where crises of climate, patriarchy, and technology demand alternative visions to resist despair.
DIRD’s works insist that apocalypse is not an event waiting in the future, but something we are already inside. From burned paper bodies to frozen browser mountains, their worlds mirror the sense of living amidst systemic breakdowns—political, ecological, technological. Yet their vision is not nihilistic. In the ruins, they conjure cycles of rebirth, queer spaces of reorientation, and monstrous figures that refuse violence.
In Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, this vision turns explicitly toward peace. Not peace as resolution or victory, but peace as an ongoing, fragile practice—a willingness to imagine otherwise. If patriarchal war games train us in repetition, DIRD proposes different loops: flickering, failing, regenerating. They create spaces where endings multiply, and where another kind of arrival might just begin.
To see more of their work, visit Instagram: @ruishi.ruins / @orchidmoths.
[1] Alan Cholodenko and Australian Film Commission, The Illusion of Life (University of Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1991).