Medium for creating light art using light and shadow

https://

Description

Thesis project that explores the creation of form and expression using the combination of light, darkness and movement.

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Thesis

“A Vociferous Silence” is a series of reactive masks that attempt to address the complexity of one’s self-concept and self-appraisal by presenting multiple aspects of inner voices.

https://

Description

Visitors are invited to put their faces into the masks and cover their ears. A voice is heard through bone conduction activated by physical touch. What the user hears creates the illusion of having a voice in their head. The narration reveals different aspects of my own self-image. Each mask focuses on one of the following aspects: negativity, positivity, and uncertainty. As our filters for Reality, how we see ourselves influence everything we do or say, everything we feel, or otherwise perceive. In a sense, one’s perception of others is a reflection of oneself. Thus, I see “A Vociferous Silence” as a VR piece as well but a different kind of virtual, where the experiencer is forced to become another person by wearing a new face and listen to a new self-image. I have two goals for this project. First, I want to discover the unknown me, with whom I barely communicate but am always influenced by: the hidden character behind the face in the mirror that thinks, dreams, talks, feels and believes. Second, I hope that other people who share similar experiences will come to know that they aren't alone, and, I hope that will be comforting.

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Thesis

My thesis project, Letâ€s Read A Story, is a speculative exploration on how computers and technology can turn story time into a conversation between parents, children and a computer. Human gestures — speaking, drawing, typing – allows the reader to participate in a new form of conversation on a smart device (tablet or a smart speaker) that yields a surprising new story.

www.letsreadastory.xyz

Description

Technology and smart devices are ever present in childrenâ€s everyday lives and their development. Letâ€s Read A Story investigates the possibilities of enhancing storytime for children with a Machine Learning-based program to engaging a child’s creativity, imagination, and inventiveness. The program is intended to be an activity joined by parents and child.

The project addresses the following questions:
1. can technology augment how parents read and tell stories to children?
2. Can a child interact with a piece of technology to create a meaningful connection through literature, sound and visual art?

Using recently possible machine learning techniques, various childrenâ€s literature corpuses have been analyzed in order to build a conversational platform that allows the reader to navigate through different narrative bits and pieces to weave a new, original immersive story of his own. The core of the experience is in the form of generated text that is a response or an answer to a human gesture (e.g speaking or drawing). The text is the first layer that carries the plot progression forward, on top of which, layers of generative sound and illustration are formed to enhance the text and based on various predictive models.

Lastly, the reader can change and bend the story as it progresses, drawing illustrations of their own and changing lines of text as their heart desires.

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Thesis

My thesis project “Blind Date” is an interactive story with game elements in the format of a phone-based website. It features a 28-year-old single Chinese womanâ€s struggles with enormous pressure to get married early. It is a reflection and critique of the conventions surrounding marriage in contemporary Chinese society.

https://xiranisabear.com/blind-date

Description

“Blind Date” is a storytelling project that talks about marriage in the format of a web-based interactive story. A user plays the role of a 28-year old Chinese single woman who is being pressured by her friends and family to get married.
There are three chapters in this game. The first chapter features the protagonistâ€s conversation with her best friend, Lorna, about the wedding of her younger friend, Cici. Along with the conversation, Lorna encourages the protagonist to date someone and warns her about the danger of becoming a leftover woman. In chapter two, the protagonist has a WeChat talk with her mother. Marriage is brought up in this conversation. And the resistance from the protagonist to get married angers her mother and leads to a fight between them. The protagonist compromises in the end and agrees to go on blind dates with several different men. That introduces the third chapter of the game.
In the first two chapters of the game, the user will be clicking through different buttons and graphics to follow the story. In the third chapter, the user will make some decisions before she goes on blind dates and the choices she makes will effectively change the ending of the whole story.
The user will be able to feel the increasing level of pressure the protagonist feels as the story goes on and hopefully he or she can take some insights away after experiencing this story.

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Thesis Presentation Video

Widowhood is an invisible state in todayâ€s society. “Widow” is an interactive textile sculpture that exposes the wounds, pain, and emotions that embody my experience as a widow. With this installation, I aim to inspire others in the hopes that they become aware of all the devastating losses that come after the tremendous passing of a spouse.

https://www.alexandra-lopez.com/itp-thesis

Description

Historically, we widowed women have been portrayed wearing long black dresses, a distinctive image that summons the iconographic fashion from the Victorian era in which mourning rites were strict and remarkably complex, following the example of Queen Victoria after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Victorian widows endured this burden for four years. This fashion comprised heavy black clothes with thick veils of crepe, and hats equally black and dense that lacked any kind of decoration. This mourning clothing, known as “widow’s weeds “, distinguished the grieving widows from the rest of society. It was a visible indication of the pain for the death of their spouses, with black signifying the absence of light, represented the spiritual seclusion of the mourning woman.
This textile sculpture references the “widowâ€s weeds” and the social implications they represent. In a close examination of this costume, the structure underneath those dresses or “cage skirts” is the tangible metaphor I used to recreate and inhabit my own twisted cage skirt. It is a meditative space where I invite the public to take part in and to reflect on the journey and the humiliation I experienced as a young widow. This installation represents my fight against the stigma that is deeply rooted in widowâ€s fashion and the other social roles that women were expected to follow when they lost their husbands.

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Undercover is an autobiographical performance that weaves vignettes of memory, music and pop culture imagery into a narrative that explores misogyny, gender, and identity from the perspective of a transman.

Description

As a transgender man, Iâ€ve realized that there are things that men say to each other in the absence of women and things women say to each other in the absence of men. In fact, there are many changes Iâ€ve noticed, particularly in the way that people treat and perceive me after transitioning. I now find myself in the predicament of being held accountable for a social history of misogyny that Iâ€ve lived on the receiving end of for many years prior. Undercover shares this perspective through a 5-minute show.

The viewer doesnâ€t know any of this backstory when they enter the space. During the piece, the viewer listens and watches a narrative that uses sound, light, images, a two-way mirror, with an element of surprise at the end. It takes place inside of a curtained off, dark space, similar to a photo or fortune-telling booth, where the viewer enters and sits down on the chair in front of a black wall that frames a 12” x 12” mirror and puts on headphones. The narration begins with the viewer looking at their own reflection. A minute in, the lights are gradually dimmed, and images relating to the audio are projected on a screen on the other side of the mirror. In the last 45 seconds, the images disappear and the light inside the space changes to reveal the narrator (me) sitting on the other side of the mirror. Putting myself in the space with the viewer on the other side of the divider, and making eye contact through the two-way mirror during the last moments of the show, breaks down the fourth wall and further humanizes the story. I understand that this may be a bit uncomfortable and that is by design.

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Thesis

This is a series of avatar-based, Augmented Reality body sculptures of surreal scenes from everyday life in an imaginary future where the roles of human and machine are reversed. Combining social commentary and satire, this project reflects alienation of and between individuals and their surrounding environments due to increasing complexity and capability of technology in the age of algorithm.

http://tongwumedia.com/blog/daily-dividuals

Description

“Daily Dividuals” includes a series of Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures presented in short movie clips to provide context. To reflect on the core concept, human alienation in the digital age, the project layers the theme and presents, through an AR lens, the imaginary transformation of the human body merging with and functioning as everyday objects.

The project contains two experiments with three examples in each. The student scanned her body to create a hyper-flexible avatar model, and used the model as the key material to construct scenes in the project. The first experiment creatively associates body avatars with everyday objects in shape and function, and explores the possibility and flexibility to duplicate and modify avatar models in an AR environment.

The second experiment is a continuation of the first. It purposely reverses the conventional ways a human interacts with common devices, thus presenting an unorthodox perspective in which to reexamine the alienation of humans. The second experiment has more interactivity involved. The audience can explore layers of the AR sculptures through various actions. Therefore, the “seeing” and the “being seen” together fulfill the concept of this experience.

Playing with dystopian connotations through the jarring and surreal images, the project prompts viewers to pause and consider the phenomena of estrangement observed in our evolving relationship to and dependence on machines.

When the public becomes insensitive to being treated as measurable data and samples; when people are used to only see highly abstract representation of the complex digital world; when intensive, repetitive human labor is constantly fed into the artificial intelligence industry, are we still dominating the machines, or are we being dominated? We strive to make machines more like us, but it may be that we are becoming more like machines. In a way, we are meeting machines in the middle.

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Thesis