zixi li
Material Futures MA
Central Saint Martins UAL
Specialisms: Interaction Design / Fine Art / Art Performance
Location: London, United Kingdom
zixi li
First Name: zixi
Last Name: li
Specialisms: Interaction Design / Fine Art / Art Performance
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: Central Saint Martins UAL
Course / Program Title: Material Futures MA
About
Zixi Li is a London-based contextual designer whose practice operates between material culture, speculative design, and critical making. Through thinking by making, she transforms abstract questions into experiential objects and installations. Her work investigates how materials, technologies, and institutions shape collective behaviour and cultural values. Drawing from craft practices, historical research, and critical theory, she creates participatory systems that expose the tensions between control and agency, permanence and decay, individuality and collective experience.
Using the church organ as a historical reference, Rocking Pipe Organ investigates how unity is produced through the coordination of bodies. Three interconnected bellow chairs require participants to work together in order to generate harmony, transforming sound into a visible expression of collective labour. Yet synchronisation is difficult to maintain. Misalignment, fatigue, and bodily difference continually interrupt the process, producing dissonance instead of harmony. By making effort audible and visible, the installation reveals the unstable conditions that sustain collective systems. Harmony emerges only temporarily, exposing unity not as a natural condition, but as a fragile and contingent achievement.