With a strong passion for experimental designs, Yilin Du is a recently graduated visual artist based in London.

Until Summer 2022, when Yilin was pursuing her MA in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, she had always been focused on how to create a means to recycle the present and shape the future.

Her project constantly explore How are digital technologies shaping our sense of identity and how will we evolve online? Make Man Up is a series of design provocations intended to explore how our identities are continually being shaped through our interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology.

Set within a digital chatroom, Make Man Up starts with creating a digital self that allows us to converse with ourselves through the lens of an avatar. Training the algorithm for weeks, the final video is an outcome of the impact of technology on our sense of individual and collective identity. This project not only questions how ‘human’ we perceive our AI generated self to be, but also explores what the evolution of our digital-self will look like.