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PlaNet in Crisis is a series of web pages exploring the fragmented, confusing, and ambient nature of climate change-related grief.
 

PlaNet in Crisis is a series of web pages that traverse emotional responses to climate change. In a series of “rooms” that the viewer can visit, the project presents various forms of interactive text and generative ecological art, all leaning into the surreal feelings that emerge when grappling with a planet in suffering. Studies have shown that young people across the globe are responding to climate change with emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and guilt. Climate change emotions can also manifest across different timescales: felt in grief for extinct species, for land lost to unfolding natural disasters, and as young people grieve for their lost futures. Sometimes, the way that climate change information is presented can be so overwhelming that people become apathetic to the subject.

The project consists of a minimalistic home page, with buttons that lead to an introduction to the project, in addition to pages numbered 1-4. The introduction contains clickable text with an ambient style, grounding the user in the context of the project with a poem inspired by Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Page 1, titled “The Algorithmic Beauty Of Slow Violence”, features three slowly growing fractal trees and a clock counting down to July 28, 2028, which is the estimated date that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees warming. The trees generate a new layer roughly every 6 minutes, and it takes 38 minutes for the trees to grow a full cycle. The second page is called “Understanding our interconnected world”, it is a collective canvas made using WebSocket, where multiple users can visit and generate moss-like visuals on each other’s browsers. The third page, “Corporate Rhetoric as Reassurance” projects an ExxonMobil press statement on climate policy onto a 3D visualization of global temperature change from 1880 to 2016. Combined with audio of a 10-hour oil engine sound originally posted on a white noise channel for sleep, this page hits on the strangeness of the relationship between corporate and consumer. The fourth page is inspired by the fact that in order to grapple with confusing emotions, naming them is a start. When the user opens the page, they are greeted with text that reads, “what does it mean to think about climate change as a way of mourning?” and they are able to type a response that rotates randomly, creating a winding effect to echo the non-linear fashion of climate emotions.

PlaNet in Crisis is a series of four distinct pages/rooms, reflecting the fragmented experience of processing climate grief. It takes advantage of the web browser as a form of time-based media, allowing user experiences to unfold over time, according to the temporal logic of climate change: its slowness and dispersion. Additionally, browser art can be accessed by multiple users at once, reflecting our interconnected relationship with the earth. Through this minimalist form, it aims to offer a space of solace and questioning — a collective anthology of grief and hope.

“Self, Digi” is an experimental VR fashion show for exploring the possibilities of using VR as an interactive medium to support fashion designers presenting their clothes economically, environmentally, and in a functionally friendly way.
 

“Self, Digi” is an interactive fashion show in virtual reality for the “NanoLove” capsule collection. Through the construction of a virtual environment and the application of digital assets, “Self, Digi” creates a platform for fashion designer Dana Kosber to have a hyperspatial dialogue with the audience to discuss the interaction of fashion, self, and love in the cyberspace era. Unlike traditional fashion shows, the audience can experience the entire show from a first-person perspective. Haoquan Wang as the director of show gives the freedom of going through the whole show and trying clothes to the audience. The audience will be able to observe the clothes closely and try them on through the function of the avatar’s cloning. The interaction design of avatar cloning and the conversation with the avatar is used as a metaphor and implication to express Haoquan’s understanding of digital and fashion: “Fashion is one of the extensions of self-expression and identity. In the digital world in the future, identity and expression are easy to switch, copy and experience”. In the final stage of the show, the audience can have an understanding of the design concept and emotional transmission from the designer and the director.

Tags:#VirtualReality#Fashion#Runwayshow

Sentient Complex is a project that consists of an ecology of responsive agents that attempt to collectively identify and perceive the emerging behavior of the visitors. Considered as an extension of the function of architecture, this complex of agents suggests new hybrids that span across different dimensions and forms.

Sentient Complex is a project that investigates in the fields of interactive architecture where spaces are considered as capable of sensing and actuating. With the advancement of related technology, the perception of architecture is becoming more fluid. Architecture is no longer considered as static or exists on human terms, but rather as living entities able to respond and adapt to changing conditions. Such notions of responsiveness and involvement allow architectural space to engage in conversations as well as reciprocal experience with its occupants, and ultimately have it become a more sentient presence. This project, hence, investigates an alternative consideration of architecture as living, sentient presence which, along with its occupants, constitutes a system where communication is primarily elicited by sentience and empathy is perceived through mutual experience.

The project consists of an ecology of responsive agents that attempt to collectively identify and perceive the emerging behavior of the visitors. It focuses on kinetic interactions, examining forms of non-verbal dialogue between human and architectural agency. Considered as an extension of the function of architecture, this complex of agents suggests new hybrids that span across different dimensions and forms. Each of the agents shares a similar appearance consisting of a rotating surface embedded with sensor and lights to inform the interaction with the visitors, and also a main body of actuators which drives its motion. In a darkened environment, the agents are attached to several self-standing supporting structures, and are distributed with different positions and orientations to form a spatial configuration.

By responding to the stimuli in their surroundings independently, the complex of agents constantly re-configure the spatial formation and presents a functional and aesthetic potency in harnessing emergent patterns of behavior from the cybernetic system. Such a behavior pattern, with much room for speculation and development, is considered as a potentiality for connecting the sense of artificial life with architectural space. By endowing the architectural agents sentience and personalities, this project seeks to create a sensation of communication between independent agents which is not only compelling, but also, in some cases, emotionally affective.

Tags:#ResponsiveSpace#Cybernetics#HMI

This is an art installation designed to share how migrant families have been impacted due to changes in society, public policies, and the education system. It tells the stories of Partings and Togetherness, Memory and Loss in the phenomenon of first-born children left behind in the countryside and second-borns growing up in China’s cities.
 

I am a migrant worker’s child who grew up in Shanghai. My older sister was ‘left behind’ in our family’s village in Anhui. Though we are siblings our memories of our childhood – moments we had together and the time we were apart are very different. This project explores the phenomenon of China’s “left behind children” and “migrant workers children” from a unique and very personal angle. I interviewed my sister who was left behind in rural China. Then, I conducted more interviews of other siblings who have similar experiences with us back in my hometown in Anhui. For many years, most of the studies in China have been focused on the issues of “left-behind children” and “migrant worker’s children” separately, to study how the changes of education system, public policies and parenting have impacted them. In my project “Partings and Togetherness, Memories and Loss”, I intend to gather some common and symbolic elements that were found along with my interviews with those siblings. Therefore, to create the atmosphere for the audiences to explore the feelings me and my interviewees expressed. Through the display of various media contents that used to express emotions and feelings, audiences are also encouraged to explore how those two groups of children have been influenced by changes of education system, public policies and parenting, etc.

“At the Door: A Shanghai Lilong Soundwalk” invites the audience to take a thirty minute walk through a nearly abandoned lilong in the historical city core of Shanghai. The soundwalk offers an immersive sonic experience of life in a lilong. The tour explores the dichotomy between private and public space and the memories they contain. It serves as a reflection on the current moment of Shanghai’s lilongs and offers a new perspective on these places.

  “At the Door: A Shanghai Lilong Soundwalk” focuses on the typical living compound of Shanghai lilong, a special kind of lane dense housing complexes in Shanghai, and by extension, a community centered on a lane or several interconnected lanes. It is a unique living compound where visibility and openness replace walls. A lot of activities happen in the shared public spaces. Sound travels everywhere due to the limited space owned by each person and the not soundproof enough construction. This project takes an acoustic approach to document the “fluid dynamics” of the Shanghai lilong. The fluid dynamics of the ever-changing soundscape of the place, of the changes in residents, and of the relocation, gentrification, and preservation of Shanghai lilongs.The project invites the audience to take a thirty-minute walk through a nearly abandoned lilong in the historical city core of Shanghai near Laoximen Subway Station. The soundwalk offers an immersive sonic experience of life in a lilong. The tour explores the dichotomy between private and public space and the memories they contain. It serves as a reflection on the current moment of Shanghai’s lilongs and offers a new perspective on these places.

There are in total five sections, featuring the 360-dimensional immersive soundscape of lilong space, and four diverse groups of people talking about their stories and perspectives towards life in lilongs from 1960 to 2021. Together they lead the audience through the living experience, of sharing some common space with familes living in the same house, frequent neighborhood interaction in a lane, and the daily routine in a lilong compound.

“Change” plays an important role in this project. The site and route went through several adjustments due to these changes. Every time I went on the tour, I would discover something new. The family that lived behind the narrow red wooden door in March was no longer there in early May. The green bar gate that was accessible 3 days ago got a metal lock on it last time I went there. A great number of lilong houses in Shanghai have gone through reconstruction and gentrification and no longer accommodate people. The project however does not answer how these houses or neighborhoods should be preserved, but rather serves as the documentation of the place in the form of sound. The reason why it is important may be answered by one of the interviewees, “we may not see these houses and lanes again”.