Gene Chen (London Design Festival 2025)
Sandwich Biscuit is an ongoing post-photographic project that uses recursive image-making, iterative reproduction, and digital reconstruction to interrogate how identity is dismantled and rewritten by cultural symbols and systems of viewing.
Photography is treated as accumulation and consequence: street fragments are collected, annotated, remodelled, rephotographed, and reprinted so that process becomes critique. FG applies this method to First Gundam (RX-78), an ambient icon for a Taiwanese generation raised amid Japanese ACG imports—stickers, toys, storefront displays—familiar yet foreign. In London, those residues return as psychic shelters.
The series begins with Default Code Images (device filenames/timestamps), printed and hand-marked as Re-Coding Notes, then splits into two reconstructions: photogrammetry (edges, spatial trace) and Gaussian Splatting (radiant density). Glitches, voids, and soft edges are kept; technical “failures” become evidence of mediation—form as feeling.
By selecting, coding, and multiplying a mass-produced icon, FG stages a loop—cultural penetration → internalisation → de-subjectification → reassembly → representation → the surfacing of power. What I do to images mirrors what the environment does to me.
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