PARALLEL CHAOS
2016
Art and Technology MFA Thesis
Exhibited in A402 Gallery
California Insititute of the Arts
Parallel Chaos is an interactive installation that invites viewers to experience the responsive environment by simple gesture of flipping a handmade poetry book. This is a poem of mixing voices from Twitter. The moment of the flipping page triggers the' RETWEET' sign.
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION 视频记录
I made an interactive book that engages visitors in different environments by flipping pages. The content of the book is a poem written by a friend who is a creative writer. She reconstructed various fragments from social media platforms, while also drawing on various stories from Chinese mythology – an attempt to comment on the poetics of fragmentation by combining sources from different time periods. I mapped the poetic fragments with narrative visuals in an immersive environment through computational and interactive media.
Download the Poetry here
I am always fascinated with the cubism paintings in the 20th century. Cubist artists depict the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Nowadays, the idea of cubism exists in every moment of our life. For example, you only need to click on home key of your phone, and you can see multiple time and space presented in different apps. In the age of ‘information overload’, the intercultural society for me is a contemporary cubism painting.
The environment was built with over 20,000 pieces of Chinese Go beads that represent exchanging thoughts with the infinite possibilities of the arrangement of pieces within the game. The interactive visuals are made with photographic images through digital rendering, and are constructed in a cubist manner with strong geometric shapes. This project challenges the traditional way of reading books (collections of data) by connecting visitors’ gestures and bodily movements to the narrative-based environment. A novel system of narrative is generated through algorithms that develop a stochastic relationship between visitors and the spatial information.
The dimensionless data land is a miniature of the social landscape, and it present my comprehension of the informational cubism society. I create this virtual world that can be interactively explored and navigated by audience. Like Bill Viola said
‘ life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting’.
