Version Credit

Current active team member based on location

YIN Aiwen (active in NL)

ZHAO Mengyang (active in US)

ZHAO Yiren (active in CN)

HUANG Jiadai (active in CN)

Anouk Asselineau (active in NL)

Elli Kuruş (active in DE)

Liquid Dependencies Theory

Liquid Dependencies Theory is an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to exploring the gray zone between socially-engaged art and social innovation. It is founded by artist and design theorist YIN Aiwen, writer and academia Zoe ZHAO, and educator and community practioner Yiren ZHAO . Their collaboration began with the LARP game "Liquid Dependencies: What does a decentralized caring society look like?", and subsequentially extends into a hybrid practice that leverges the power of art, technology and social innovation. Their practices depart from the current reality, and attempt to use technology as a medium to bring people together for a common-oriented, sustainable society.

YIN Aiwen is a practicing designer, researcher, theorist, strategist and project developer, who uses writing, speculative design and time-based art to examine the social impact of planetary communication technologies. She advocates relationship-focused design as a strategy to redesign, re-engineer and reimagine the relationship between technology and society. Besides publishing and exhibiting internationally, she also works as a strategist and researcher for cultural institutions. YIN obtained an MFA degree from Design department of Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, and a BFA on Visual Communication from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. She is the Pathway Leader (Head of Department) for Situated Design in the Master Institute of Visual Cultures, St.Joost School of Art and Design in Avans Creative Innovation. In 2019, YIN received the INFORM prize for Conceptual Design for her work.

ZHAO Mengyang (she/they) is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research interests are digital labor, future of work and social movements. Their dissertation analyzes the history and rise of platform video game work in China. ZHAO's writings were published in Critical Sociology, Social Science Quarterly and they have been a freelance writer for more than a decade.

ZHAO Yiren is an educator, facilitator and community artivist, with an educational background in psychology. She works for an education foudation based in Shanghai, and previously worked as a research assistant and project manager for Inter-Asia School and its project WestHeavens. She is an active member of Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society since it was founded in 2015, with interdisciplinary concerns and practice about mutual-aid, community art, and self-organized school, and cooperated with different kinds of local stakeholders. Her experience in education and psychology weaves into her social and artistic practice, and has been invited to exhibit and talk related topics in museums, gallaries, univesities and research centers.

Elli Kuruş

Elli Kuruş is a Leipzig-based collective artist, 44% complete. Her practice spans artistic and curatorial approaches that converge into installations, videos, drawings and lecture performances. Investigating the agency of the things around her, she critically examines the development of media and technology, reading the present as material history.

ReUnion Troupe / Host Communities

ReUnion Troupe is a derived community of Liquid Dependencies. As a loosely organized collective, ReUnion Troupe is initated in Shanghai by a group of people who played the game and later become hosts and committed co-creators of the game. By collectively creating host characters, world building and acting, the community continously refine the game and generate new spin offs, such as workshops, publications, and digital derivies of the game. Through these closely knited collective process, the members of the community practice self-care, mutual-aid and peer-to-peer solidarity, inquiring each other through virtual bodies, leveraging reality in alterantive spacetime. Till now, ReUnion Troupe continously run by the members in Shanghai, and offer organizing experiences and exchanges for the forming of ReUnion Troupe in Leipzig, Amsterdam, and other potential cities.

Members in Shanghai

Members in Leipzig

Members in Amsterdam

Anouk Asselineau, Lenn Cox,