Idea 1:
Melting Memories & Sobering Dreams
Urbanization and redevelopment have caused destruction to a city’s heritage. Memories of our habitats disappear due to demolition, deconstruction, and urban deforestation. The concept of this piece is a visual exploration of the city that retore its lost memories, narrate its story, and speculate its banal future. The project would be a way of documenting reality, memory, and dreams with volumetric capture, photogrammetry, and 3d modeling, then reimagining these moments through pixels and data(point clouds). The audiences are able to experience these moments in virtual reality/augmented reality, through a dream-like journey taking you from the past, back to the present, and to the future.
References: Memories Of Tsukiji by RubenFro, The Spectral Eyes by Benjamin Bardou, Azure Kinect VFX by Keijiro, Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol
Idea 2:
BloodMesh
This project is an experimental study and proposal for projection mapping and AI data sculpture in Mount Rushmore Memorial. This digital public art piece create an immersive experience that intertwines physical sculpture with technology, art, and data in the public spaces. The idea is to project and video map the entire surface of the sculpture with digital artwork using projectors. The sculpture would be a parametric 3d printed sculpture consisting of multiple heads. The artwork would result from unique computer-generated faces of different races and ages as a call for unity and racial equality in this politically divided era. By feeding image data of Americans into an AI algorithm and a machine learning model called StyleGan, I am able to generate an infinite amount of photorealistic high-quality photos of faces. The processed latent walk video would then be projected in dots or lines to create a mesmerizing and dynamic particle system of everchanging faces of Americans.
References: StyleGan, Ethereal by Refik Anadol, Dare to Dream by Ouchhh Studio
Idea 3:
Mycelium Window(?)
Similar to Derek Thompson’s remark in The Atlantic, “walking through the streets of Manhattan feels like being in two worlds at the same time.” When the street lights are off, luxurious shops are closed, the windows of the empty storefronts serve to be nothing but mirrors for the pedestrians. Living in New York, I witness first-hand how the dispassionate architectural designs hinder human connection and I can’t help but lament at the apathy that resulted in this disintegration of such a rich culture.
I am fascinated by how the fungal network connects and communicates through a vast expanse of mycelium. Inspired by how nature manifests and imparts the importance of interconnectedness, together with technology and machine learning algorithms, which allow human detection and image segmentation, I envision a public installation that connects humans and facilitates interactions like mycelium do among vegetation.
Possible location: Window of empty storefronts on University Place near Union Square.
References: Bodypix