Keyin Wu | Path : A Ritual for Paper-cut

 
Path is an interactive virtual experience connecting audiences’ presence and attention with Chinese paper cutting, which allows them to navigate through a 3D web space and generate a paper cut art. Interactive experience is not only about user actions, but also involves their subsequent cognitive processes, such as the perception of the interactive system, the reflection on their presence and the environment, and the understanding of the behaviors as well as subjects in the experience. Following research on the impact of interactive experience on human cognition, this project is investigating how interaction design can promote people’s understanding of the marginalized traditional culture on a different level than before, specifically in this case of Chinese paper cutting, how the sense of presence and multiple layers of feedback can help audiences understand the subject better.

Due to the pandemic situation, the experience is shifted from a physical installation to a web-based virtual exhibition. The contents to deliver are arranged within a fan shape and have four categories, including patterns, techniques, contexts and spirits. Each piece is attached to a symbol extracted from the repetitive and representative units from the corresponding paper-cuts. This repetition is also one characteristic of Chinese paper cutting. The whole design is centered around the core spirit of Chinese paper cutting, where it uses its special language of cutting to hide infinite possibilities between square inches of a small piece of paper. The user can move in the 3D web space to interact with them. Meanwhile, the project will transform the path of user movement to an animated pattern related to paper-art in order to highlight the users’ presence and attention. It is because, for one thing, the path can reveal their stream of thought in face of Chinese paper cutting contents; for another, when it changes size based on users’ dwell time, the path can also indicate how much the user pays attention to the content of a certain spot. The path transformation is based on the most widely used form in Chinese paper cutting, Tuanhua(团花), where paper is always folded, cut flat and unfolded with separate but linking graphic units. The path leaves negative space at first, and will shift between positive and negative every time the user has stopped for a while. The fan shape area will be replicated to form symmetrical circles, just like how we unfold paper after cutting, which relates to the Yin & Yang philosophy as well.

By connecting users’ virtual presence and their underlying thoughts and providing real-time feedback with an animated pattern, this project intends to give contemporary audiences an interactive and reflective experience about Chinese paper cutting, which is one of the most important forms of Chinese folk art but is marginalized as a result of globalization and capitalism. The interaction paradigm in this project seeks to make a positive impact on audiences’ cognition in the given cultural context, which can also be extended to other traditional cultures.