Category: capstone2022

 
This project aims to investigate the effects and significance of visual stimuli on individual music perceptions. When observing music on a societal basis, many people commonly overlook the importance of visuals in music listening and the extent that individual perceptions are influenced by visual elements. The project distinctly uses videos and images as both factors are meant to mimic two of the most commonly viewed visual components in music culture (music videos and album/song cover art). The project focus and significance then revolves around individual awareness to music perceptions as well as consumption choices. Through completely self-created content, the project stands as an interactive installation experience in which users are guided through two audiovisual scenarios from start to finish. Each user is able to hear songs separately from visuals and then together, being able to match visuals with audio as they feel best fit. Afterwards, users are shown distinct results that compare their inputs to other users. In this case, all data is collected and then used to compare and contrast each user’s choices. By doing so, the experience offers a unique perspective on music consumption and listening by showing how and why certain visuals impact the music itself so heavily. The installation also includes specific narrative elements that are meant to mimic an AI system that “observes” each user. By creating a fake observation system, all possible song and visual outcomes are paired with unique phrases that add further engagement to the experience. As users make distinct pairing choices, the phrases create an interesting mood that adds another layer of content and character to the project. As well, in each situation, these phrases specifically stand as additional influences to certain audiovisual matches. If a user chooses a commonly paired song and visual, the phrase will cater to this choice and vice versa with uncommon pairs. Ultimately, these choices in content are meant to challenge how we consume and understand music on a day to day basis. What is then most important is not only how users interact with the installation but how their perceptions of music listening shift once finished. By creating an experience that challenges individual likes and dislikes, the project effectively shows the impacts of visual influences on auditory experiences.

 
Developed in the pre-modern era, Shanshu–i literally means mountains and water– has now become a symbol of Chinese culture.

However, Moving away from the original content and form of pre-modern Chinese landscape paintings, a lot of new media artists appropriations of shanshui tend to focus on the appealing visuals and immersive experience. Thus, the spirits of shanshui behind those visuals are lost. My project“Reconstructing Shanshui” hence, is a video installation that channels the shanshui form with its spiritual connections by bringing two man-made nature together–the screen-based landscape imagery and the artificial garden. In doing so, this project offers audiences a way to rethink new-media shanshui art and its relation to nature in contemporary contexts.

In the first scene, the visuals change from real landscapes to ink and brushes. The final ink and brush scene is generated by a touch designer based on the real landscape video input. I liquified the real landscape to restore the Chinese ink and brush painting effect because pre-modern Shanshui painting is the source for all the appropriations of visual motifs and aesthetics. I want to show the changing process of Chinese landscape paintings are developed from real nature, the mountains and waters. In terms of the settings, I project the visuals onto the window, with the silhouette of real plants, the juxtaposition gives the sense of entering a trance and poses a set of contrasts — tradition and technology, digital and natural, lights and shadows.

In the second scene, I present what I consider a typical digital-rendered mountain visuals onto a water tank hidden among plants, with water dripping into the tank, creating both a rippling effect and aquatic soundscape.

In both scenes, I present the screen-based landscape visuals in an artificially composed garden setting. As a whole, my project creates an interwoven sense of physical/digital, realism/illusionism, which pushes us to rethink how new media art can both inherit and enhance the shanshui as a form, but at the same time rebuild its connection to various forms of “nature” in contemporary times.

 
“The Nostalgia Bug” is a multimedia installation rooted somewhere between the past and present. Through old tech and objects, it reflects on the panic of the Y2K Computer Bug. With elements of visual media, such as video, and other objects, it highlights the uncertainty of the ongoing pandemic left in the wake of the COVID-19 virus. All together, through senses of sight, touch, and hearing, “The Nostalgia Bug” aims to welcome viewers in to an eerily nostalgic experience, and push them to not only recognize both the Y2K Computer Bug and COVID-19 Virus as contributing factors to moments of uncertainty in different moments of time, but also see the potential connection between them.

 
Wanderlust is an AR project that leads people to wander and enjoy a pure walking without any practical purpose. Instead of finding the fastest or shortest route like other navigation apps, wanderlust would generate a random route for the users every time and leads them to explore the area around them through AR. Walking, especially wandering is a practice that can promote thinking, instigate creativity and new ideas, or help people to relax from the fast-paced life. However, it’s becoming harder to wander and perceive the environment in this era because of the obsession with efficiency and people’s reliance on digital maps, navigation systems, GPS, and other location-based technologies. This project, hence, aims to get people to start wandering again and pay more attention to walking as a non-functional pure practice and the physical environment.

After opening Wanderlust, the user would see a welcome AR sign and some arrows leading the user. During the walk, the user would see AR signs showing “turn left” or “turn right” and signs about some interesting and noteworthy places around the user. Very little information is presented in this application to reduce the information layer that may block users’ perception of the physical environment and all information is shown with AR.

Since when I was developing this project, Shanghai was under lockdown, I got the inspiration to also develop this project in a more artistic direction. People can virtually walk in Wanderlust by finger-walking on the screen. I want to use this project to show the tension between people wanting to go outside in this beautiful spring and the strict lockdown. It serves as a reflection on the current lockdown situation in Shanghai and all those prevailing ideas about the metaverse and virtual world.

 
Women in the Middle: Motherhood Voices and Transforming Reproductive Policies in China is a multimedia installation that explores the contrast and tensions between China’s national-level fertility policies and the imperceptible, intimate responses of different women. In May 2021, The Communist Party of China’s Central Committee issued the universal third-child policy, stating that a couple can have a maximum of three children. Prior to this, the one-child policy enacted in the 1970s radically changed China’s population. The current adjustment has shown the government’s altered attitudes toward births: people should have more children in order to maintain a normal demographic structure. Birth control through legislation is already a well-known Chinese action on a state level, which illustrates the attitude from a national perspective. However, if we take a step back and adjust our perspective on individual women who possess reproductive rights, they are the individuals who are directly influenced by the birthing policies. These women’s opinions and sentiments regarding motherhood in the wake of changing childbirth policies should be heard. This project presents the voices of real, individual women amid the constantly changing and mutually contradictory childbirth policies. Before being counted as a reproductive unit or a mother, women come as the primary identity of themselves.

Women in the Middle is in the shape of a uterus that demonstrates China’s changing fertility policies over the past four decades and documents women’s personal perceptions using audio and visual components. Both the audio and visual factors are embedded within and plastered onto the uterus, a symbol of motherhood and the origin of life. The core audio element consists of interviews with eleven Chinese women, where they use their native language to share their feelings and thoughts. Spectators can listen to these recordings that form a three-dimensional soundscape while observing the skin-like texture of the uterus, which comprises curated graphic collages of the change and impacts of the childbirth policies. How will the fate of the individual, and the fate of the mother, be influenced and determined when the texture of the uterus is shaped by the reproductive policy of the state? The presence of both state-level policies and personal-level opinions aims to give the audience a glimpse of how China’s transforming fertility policies impact the lives of individual women. Ultimately, this installation asks the audience to contemplate the consequences of depriving women of and empowering them with reproductive rights.