Completed for IML 499: AI and Creativity. A short film about Earhart's daughter trying to find her mother in the vast cosmos.
Completed for IML 499: AI and Creativity. A short film about Earhart's daughter trying to find her mother in the vast cosmos.
Video made for Creative Coding Fest, supported by the Processing Foundation.
Completed for IML 328: Sonic Media Art. Abstract score for a sound piece.
American westward expansion is romanticized in history as the heroic American frontiers man going west to civilize the wilderness. The American Western sometimes brings this story to life, but often the western takes a converse narrative approach, defining civilization as corrupt and romanticizing man’s individual retreat into the wilderness and frontier as heroic. The tension between building up infrastructure and escaping that infrastructure is what we wanted to bring to life in our film. When it comes to the internet this infrastructure can be viewed as censorship. When it comes to ‘civilizing’ the vast expanse of the internet where do Americans stand? Is it heroic to censor or heroic to evade this censorship? Our film creates an environment (a physical and digital space) in which it seems just to censor content and users who are in violent pursuit of an individual. However, our film ultimately shows the perils of too much censorship and surveillance, leading to the restriction of our cowboy’s actions, including taking a photograph to spread awareness. Thus our cowboy concludes that censorship has gone too far and sets out to destroy the censoring of certain topics like “identity” “religion” and “race”. However he ultimately concludes not to destroy the restriction on hate speech, retiring his role as arbiture of the infrastructure of the web, gaining the understanding that freedom is important but that allowing free reign over the internet inherently gives voice to the powerful and silences weaker groups.
Made for IML 300: Reading and Writing the Web. Asian-Americans, growing up in the cross-section of two very different cultures, often experience confusion and dissonance regarding how families express love. This website acts as a place for people to anonymously (or not anonymously) share things that they wish they were to express to their parents.
What is collective, what is digital, and what is care in reconfigured spaces? How can we use code to express and embrace, revolt and rest? This project is a group exhibition of work from IML 300: Reading and Writing the Web and IML 400: Creative Coding for the Web, in the New Art City Virtual Art Space.
Participants: Karen Abe, Ayse Cevikel, Abby Chen, Malia Dollaga, Jennifer Lee, Angela Rong, Katie Liu, Myrah Sarwar, Jonathan Tolentino, Annaliese Tusken, Megan Yeh, Annie Zheng and Qingyu Zhu, Daisy Bell, Jay Borgwardt, Katie Chan, Jacob Pettis, Mahira Raihan, Asha Rao and Emma Sykes
Final project for IML 203: Media Arts and Practice Studio II. Originally constructed as a written manifesto essay, Rooms looks at how technology has impacted our society today. In a period of elongated isolation and distance unlike ever before we are forced to suddenly adapt to a new way of life and learn how to navigate this lifestyle.
Made in collaboration with fellow USC students Tiffany Kao, Zoe Zheng, and Helena Lu.
Made for the 18th annual “24HOURS Animation Contest for Students” 2020 challenge. Students in groups of five create a 30-second film based on a given theme in a designated 24 hour period. Teams work from their home school and submit a Youtube link of their films before the deadline, which are judged by industry artists.
This year’s theme was “How COVID-19 has affected you.” Our short film tells a story about a hardworking mother that is forced to shut down her successful restaurant due to COVID-19, but finds solace in the fact that she can now spend more time bonding with her daughter.
Project for IML 300: Reading and Writing the Web. This website is for the ongoing film project, "Mother of 500 Kids." The website tells the unheard stories of a local hero, Aunty Wu, who rescued 500+ stray animals from abandonment, physical violence, improper treatments, and black markets of animal trafficking in Tianjin, China.
Project for IML 335: Digital Narrative Design I. The prompt was to produce a short film that followed a process in one continuous take. I explored the process of converting sound to motion with a dancer from the USC Kaufman School of Dance. To get the entire sequence in one continuous shot, I captured LIDAR depth data using an Intel RealSense and manually processed the depth stream. This piece incorporates concepts of data visualization and creative code that I had explored in previous classes.
"Event Video" project for IML 335: Digital Narrative Design I. USC squares off against UCLA for more than just the Victory Bell; bowl eligibility, seasons, and jobs are on the line as the two play to end the regular season of college football.
The Portal is a site-specific two-part sound experience that uses the architectural object of an inverted fountain to imagine a fantastical realm and challenge our hesitation to the prospect of personally embarking on an adventure that is fun only from afar. The first part of the project is a fast-paced adventure narrative that follows a protagonist as she jumps into the portal and lives out a life of legendary fantasy in a magical realm. The second part, which is an experimental auditory representation of the choice the listener faces—whether to cling to the safety of the familiar, or to risk losing it for something potentially greater.
Viola Lasmana explores multimodal composition as a transformative scholarly practice, and offer examples from various projects that incorporate and also go beyond traditional scholarship.
Blue Succession, directed and produced by Katie Luo and Eilythia Penati, unfolded as a captivating multimedia experience. This collaboration showcased the talents of eight media artists and fashion designers (Johans, Ashley Kim, John Miranda, Han Zhuang, Sade Korbieh, Jeana Park, Mika Shardarbekova, Tobi Ogunyankin). Together, they crafted a four-chapter narrative—Seed, Flora, Decay, and Rebirth—delving into the cyclical essence of life.
Blue Succession was a semester-long project. The final show took place in the setting of a student's backyard, transformed into a unique space with a four-walled "cube" crafted from fabric and beams. Each wall served as a canvas, unveiling different chapters of the narrative through interactive projection mapping, illuminated from various vantage points. Dancers modeled fashion pieces, performing improvised choreography synced with a poetic audial piece featuring experimental sound and music design.
Images by: Kaitlin Mendoza, Sam Walker, and Alysha Wang
MA+P major Bo Kim and MA+P minor Zifei Zhang hosted an independently curated exhibition, following a curatorial apprenticeship completed under Daniela Lieja Quintanar at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. The program was conceived as a student-run art show with no financial, social, or skill barriers to exhibiting work. Artists included Manasa Sundaram, Maria Eberhart, Jess Wang, Kev Yin, Georgia Burki, Brett Park, Cole Slater, Marissa Ding, Alexis Cvitkovich, Claire Lee, Aylish Turner, Nicolas Diaz-Magaloni, Sam Fredericks, & Jayna Dias.
Made in IML 475: The Art and Practice of Giant Screen Cinema. The assignment was to create a 60-90 second project for the Giant Screen on a subject of the student's choice. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate an understanding of the framing and pacing conventions inherent to Giant Screen filmmaking.
This product video showcases a lamp inspired by microscopic ocean organisms called coccolithophores. The purpose behind the design is to not only bring beauty into one’s home, but to spark an inquiry. How will we as designers use our art to educate, inspire, and provide learning to others?
This book created by AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory against Impunity in collaboration with the Association Mothers of April (AMA) arises with the aim of denouncing the crimes against humanity committed by the State of Nicaragua against the population that protested in 2018 in opposition to the government of President Daniel Ortega and the Vice President Rosario Murillo. This piece aims to dignify the memory of the victims, to be a contribution to the defense of human rights, the reconstruction of the rule of law and the search for Transitional Justice in Nicaragua.
The book collects around 100 stories of victims murdered by the regime, told through the voices of their families, members of the victims’ organization Association Mothers of April (AMA). It also includes an Augmented Reality component that, through the reading of QR codes on mobile devices, allows access to the testimonies of families on video, maps about the events and virtual altars that hold memory objects of the victims in 3D. Users will be able to see the books, trophies, study materials and resistance of the victims that portray their interests, dreams and ties with their communities.
“The components and various digital formats of this project allow the stories of the victims to travel beyond their homes and their families and achieve, despite the de facto state of exception that prevails in Nicaragua, transform any public and private space in a site of collective memory,” shared Emilia Yang Rappaccioli, director of AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory against Impunity.
About Mothers of April Association (AMA)
In 2018, the State of Nicaragua committed crimes against humanity against the civilian population, denied their responsibilities, criminalized and re-victimized the victims and their families, denying them the right to memory. The brutal repression unleashed by the regime left 328 people murdered between April 18 and October 5, 2018, according to data from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) based on the documentation of the complaints presented by relatives of the victims. The Mothers of April Association (AMA) is made up of relatives of the victims who organized with the aim of fighting together for truth, justice, comprehensive reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. Three years after the acts of repression, they continue to fight for these principles.
Designed in IML 230: Fundamentals of Media Design. The card set has a full hand from Ace to King, thematically designed to illustrate the unique culture shared by by Hawaii locals. "Mākou" means "us" in Hawaiian and represents how the "local culture" is shared among a mixture of communities in Hawaii including locals, immigrants and native Hawaiians.
As we go about our daily lives, work tends to pile up and fill our plate. Often, it can feel as if we have an endlessly growing list of things to-dos every day. For teens and young adults acquiring more life responsibilities, QuestHaven seeks to make the process of “adulting” more fun.
Project for IML 300: Reading and Writing the Web. The mission with this website was to inform students about food insecurity in Los Angeles, provide actionable items for students to get involved, and locate nearby food pantries or food banks that are accepting donations.
Project for IML 404: Tangible and Spatial Computing. AR Playdates enable children and grandparents to play together, wherever they are. As more families live further apart from one another, virtual playdates could restore intergenerational relationships. From concept to user testing, I developed the software in Java, managed hardware and creative teams, and coordinated press coverage by industry and academic publications.
Project for IML 328: Sonic Media Art. A podcast that plays with the meaning and mechanics of language through sound mediums.
The intention of ‘A Cyborg Love Story’ was to draw from Donna Harroway’s Cyborg Manifesto in our exploration of what it means to be loved. We aimed to create a narrative that depicts the value of platonic love and relationships juxtaposed to traditional notions of love that exist specifically within romantic and sexual relationships. Dominant hegemonic ideas surrounding traditional love posit that it is more fulfilling and necessary than platonic love- we wanted to challenge these ideas by creating our own love story where the protagonist falls in love with a machine. Drawing from Harroway, we wanted our main character to transcend some of the binaries discussed in the manifesto- self and other, mind and body, culture and nature, etc.
Project for IML 288: Critical Thinking and Procedural Media. Produced in collaboration with students in the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Ripples is a Java Processing-based program that generates live animations of ripples for dance performances. - Credits - Director & Designer: Ethan Bresnick Director of Photography: Tim Smith Dance Artist: Aurora Vaughan Score: David Resnick Special Thanks: Micah Steinberg, DJ Johnson, and Catherine Griffiths
Voice and the ability to create sounds that emanate from the body are fundamental to human experience. Yet, many people in the hard-of-hearing community have no relationship to the creative power of their voice, and as a result, do not experience an entire aspect of human embodiment. In a collaboration between students from USC’s Thornton School of Music, students from the Kaufman School of Dance, and the project’s community partner, Hearing Loss Association of America, LA (HLAA), Here, My Voice 3 offers personalized voice lessons to members of the hard-of-hearing community to support them in developing confidence in the creative and expressive possibilities of their voice.
In the previous iterations of Here, My Voice, two-person teams consisting of a hard-of-hearing participant and a personal voice teacher from the Thornton School of Music worked in close collaboration over the course of three months to develop and implement personalized, one-on-one voice lessons. The lessons concluded in a community recital during which each of the participants gave a performance. Here, My Voice 3 expands the focus on embodiment with movement exercises, and students from the Kaufman School of Dance will support the teams through a personalized program of movements. Additionally, a documentary film will be part of the new iteration, capturing the unique collaboration and personal stories of the participants.
Juri has worked with the hard-of-hearing community throughout her PhD research in Media Arts + Practice and the Keck School of Medicine’s Bionic Ear Lab. Juri’s passion for community intervention through innovative methods across the disciplines of arts, science, and medicine has led her to consider the delicate relationship hard-of-hearing persons have with their voice and to create an experimental curriculum that focuses on providing a safe space, close collaboration, and therapeutic alliances between the teacher and learner through mutual learning. Multi-sensory engagement and embodiment are designed to support the voice perception and invigorate creative expression. Further, for the main goal of the program, Juri centers the joy of engaging in creative expression rather than improving vocal skills. This has helped to provide a therapeutic experience while supporting participants in relinquishing insecurities and exploring the power of their voice.
While voice lessons were something the project’s hard-of-hearing partners never thought possible, the program has been able to create transformative experiences of self-discovery and helped participants gain confidence. For Thornton students, preparatory workshops and the collaborations with the hard-of-hearing partners has provided a great learning experience. Overall, this multidisciplinary project integrating expertise and mentorship across multiple fields – audiology, pedagogy, music therapy, dance, and storytelling ¬– has been a great success, and Juri looks forward to continuing to explore the program’s further potential.
"These are the moments of silence, moments of fire
from the heart, where all kinds of thoughts, soft and perverse, rage alike. And even when you
start to shiver inside, you know you will be safe."
//
animation / story: Summer Xiang
music score: Jennifer Lee
voices: Valerie Wang, Cole Slater, Marco Mieles
Designed in IML 230: Fundamentals of Media Design. Students were asked to design graphics and a proposed layout for a museum exhibit. This treatment is for the "Body and Text" exhibition at the California African American Museum. This design was inspired by the main art piece that is currently being used as the cover for the exhibition, as well as the interplay between "text" and "art" as suggested by the exhibition's title.
We are dying and paying taxes while doing so; this is certain. The corporation believes that it is beyond death and taxation; the corporation would have us sacrifice ourselves, offer ourselves to its engorgement, for the sake its immortality. What’s worse, the corporation possesses us, has possessed us; we are possessed.
Let’s perform a corporate exorcism!
Join Benjamin Ross Nicholson, PhD (pending) as he guides you through both a didactic lecture concerning the mysterious figure of “Man in Business Suit Levitating” (an avatar of the corporation) and a collaborative ritual exorcism to remove the corporation from the cavity of your corpse. By accepting your death and your debt, you will discover that the quest for profit can be replaced with a desire for the well-being of others; this feels very nice.
Video remix meditation on the convergences of breath in song, protest, commodity and life.
An interactive digital instrument to assist viewers in learning the musical staff. I coded the 3D hand tracking, real-time video to audio analysis, and background removal programs in Processing.
Project for IML 202: Media Arts and Practice Studio I. A stop motion manifesto made as a reflection of trying to escape repeating systems of life.
Project for IML 202: Media Arts and Practice Studio I. The modern artist is the kleptomaniac. Fueled by a need for quick gratification from instant success, they fail to resist stealing ideas from other artists in order to “inspire” their piece. They are the most dangerous thieves because they are granted the opportunity to steal without fear of repercussion. Everything is available to them to be stolen, from digital presets to premade templates to pinterest boards of ideas that are waiting to be copied. The reality is every action can be perceived as an act of stealing, so as a society, why is the act of stealing capital or shoplifting where the moral line is drawn? Why is the stealing of ideas not considered to be actually stealing? And if everything is considered stealing, is the act of stealing truly a bad thing?
Project for IML 404: Tangible and Spatial Computing. This project explores the use of pixels and strategies for data visualization. I created a program that displays the connection between topography and its effects on climate. I used open-source depth maps and climate data, to create three-dimensional models that a user can interact with.
Final project for IML 354: Introduction to 3-D Modeling. This animation shows a butterfly interacting with an idyllic 3D scene, which was also modeled for this class.
Assignment for IML 328: Sonia Media Art. Based on my nightmare, the Dreamscape explores themes of unforeseeable futures and change. What happens when an everyday, peaceful routine suddenly goes wrong?
Borrowing from the work of Audre Lorde, this piece uses a black queer feminist lens to analyze performance as a means of survival and a tool always already expected and enforced through Black women’s bodies within the entertainment industry.
