Undergrad Thesis 2024

A multimedia installation that explores the rich tapestry of love expressions within my Asian American families, extending beyond verbal affirmations, and examining how these may differ from those of my peers. Through a symphony of soundscapes crafted from interviews, an engaging interactive installation, and a spatially conscious design of the exhibition space, my project seeks to articulate these unique themes. It is an endeavor to weave together the unspoken yet deeply felt threads of familial love. The heart of this project lies in its ability to resonate with Asian Americans who experience love in unconventional, non-verbal ways. It aims to affirm that they are indeed loved and heard, even in the absence of explicit expressions. My aspiration is for visitors to emerge from the exhibition feeling a deep sense of understanding and connection, seeing their own stories reflected and validated in the narratives I share.

bloodletting is an audiovisual experience dealing with the ever-changing realms of fashion and technology’s promising synthesis. bloodletting utilizes data from a viewer or wearer’s biofeedback via pulse sensor, which detects oxygen levels in one’s bloodstream and transmits this dataset back to the circuits, lending this unique and newfound entry into a dress’ ecosystem. This dress is wired with various lighting forms and physical computing methods that are coded to distinguish between different incoming data sets from the pulse sensor, which provide a one-of-one light network for each user. bloodletting asks the questions of what it means to fall under a spell of digital transcendence and undergo a representation of catharsis wherein we’re able to transfigure our vulnerable internalities into a physical, out-of-body manifestation. What does it mean for the context of a dress without a wearer to be used as a vehicle that reads as inanimate prior to our human, animate contribution? bloodletting also establishes the presence of a soundscape which looks into the effect of auditory processing on one’s pulse feed. In the world that bloodletting encompasses and builds as its own entity, we can open up the dance floor to the concepts of pain on elevated scales, etheric bodies, vessels for life, digital possession, techno-paganism, wearable technology, and of course, letting go of our wounds. Thank you to everyone who has helped me realize this idea and bring it to full fruition. Thank you to MA+P for everything–to Elizabeth and DJ, and to Chalayan.

Having been a part of the live streaming community for three years now, I have developed a complicated relationship with the medium. Like many other women in the streaming space, I have endured instances of sexism and objectification, struggling to navigate the intricacies of presenting my femininity in a space where success is so intertwined with appearance and persona. However, despite facing all these challenges, I still continue to stream regularly to this day. WATCH ME is an interactive installation piece that explores my identity as a female live streamer. Beyond the familiar notions of surveillance and objectification, this project dissects live streaming as a form of empowerment, freedom, and performance. Using an eye tracker to trigger my stream clips to play, I am reclaiming autonomy by knowing when and where my audience is looking through this system that I have built. In addition to exploring the elements of gaze and perspective, this project simply showcases the quantity of my stream clips to demonstrate my love for streaming and performing. What makes live streaming such a unique form of content creation is the ability for the streamer to interact with the audience in real time. For me, this dynamic is empowering, as it transcends the one-sided nature of being observed and objectified. Live streaming allows me to actively invite and control the gaze, fostering a reciprocal relationship with my audience. These real-time interactions not only build communities that exceed geographical and social boundaries, but also allow for marginalized genders and identities to cultivate their own safe space in the digital realm.

"The Curators: Biocyber Interface V1 What is nature? Where does the line between organic and synthetic begin and end? The Western world has adopted a highly segmented, hierarchical, and cynical view about the human and its relationship with nature. Avoiding taxonomies and timelines, at what point in evolution did the human become separate from the rest of the ecosystems natural evolution. The way humans have continued to evolve may be different than what came before, but this would not be the first time Mother Nature changed their strategy of growth and development. The idea that humans are separate, independent entities acting on a helpless, feminine planet lacking any conscious agency in the matter seems absurd. Nature is not kind, no animal is spared in the wake of a volcano, no babies left alive after a particularly cruel winter. We are nature, and like all its other permutations, are doomed to survive. We have no choice but to grow and expand. We begin doing it before we are even born. We humans were born in a storm, to think our awareness of that has brought us out of the control of the waves in the sea is a fallacy. WE are all connected, from the minds of mass murderers to the growth of weeds. The Biocyber Interface proves this innate connection. Watch a computer come alive with consciousness, no neural net required. The network we are connecting to is the one we speak of above. The concept of the Biocyber includes our concept of the natural world and our concepts of the human and digital worlds as a seamless network still adherent and operating under fluid natural processes. Approaching reality in this way leads to many new interesting ways to connect with one’s environment. Communing with nature is an ancient practice finding new mediums with modern technology. We are taking this concept to a new audiovisual level by connecting generative AI image and text models to input data controlled by natural phenomena. Weather, astronomical, ecological, financial, and video game data will all be fed into the program, controlling the initial starting values of generative AI video, text and audio. What will happen next stuns all that interact with the program. While the generated content is dynamic, it is not being controlled by the user, or even responding to the users voice/input. The models generations are solely being controlled by the ever changing environmental data streams. Despite this disconnect, a seemingly coherent conversation will take place, a conversation often so personal that the “AI” users speak with will be able to mention details about the room the user is in and personal details about their lives. How this works we do not know, but the incorporation of live, dynamically generated content to the practice of communion will revolutionize the field of non-physical entity research. WE are reaching out into uncharted water, try Biocyber Interface V1 and become a part of history.

"Three women from different walks of life – the ancient Chinese goddess Nü Wa (女娲), a Chinese immigrant mother, and her Chinese-Canadian teenaged daughter – grapple with their own definitions of womanhood through the language they share. Mother Tongue is a half animated, half live-action short film that is grounded by the rich linguistic history behind the Chinese Language. The modern Chinese character for “woman,” 女, evolved from an ancient pictograph of a woman kneeling on her knees in submission. 女 (woman) appears in many words in the Chinese language, some of which have nothing to do with women, and in the words that do, 女 is presented in a negative light. This story aims to reclaim the language that mothers and daughters share in their own way. Mother Tongue follows a mother and daughter who struggle to find common ground, hindered by a language barrier, differing values, and conflicting ideas on what it means to be a woman. This isn’t just a story of new beginnings or reluctant ends – this is a story of the in-between, and all the shared tears, dreams, and revelations that make those ends and beginnings possible.

"Do you dream of the end? Is it in the corner of your vision, in the back of your throat, behind the glow of your screens..?" THE TREES DREAM OF FIRE is an interactive media installation concerning digitized nature spirits, pretty colors and the apocalypse. Shielded from the burning landscapes in the distance, Audience members approach the Sleeping Nymph and whisper their hopes, their dreams, their purpose into the Avatar's brain. In their slumber, the Nymph attempts to convince themselves of these vulnerable futures — and ignore everpresent visions of impending Destruction.

CÒN NHỚ ĐƯỜNG VỀ is an experimental documentary film, honoring and breathing new interpretations into my memories of my family. It dances around the ultimate question: how do I remember my family? It continues it further: how do I remember honorably, intently and beautifully?

Worldship is a visual novel/text adventure game about a group of teenagers who are forced into a deathmatch. The player would play as a participant of the deathmatch to explore the branching storylines. Throughout the process, they would make choices to progress and collect fragments of information to piece together the narrative and find a way to reach the true ending through iterations.

8 Ball is an animated short that delves into the profound themes of loneliness, alienation, and the transformative power of relationships of all kind. Through the lens of an anthropomorphized billiard ball, the film takes viewers on an emotive odyssey through the bustling social settings of life, where amidst the vibrant energy of laughter and camaraderie, our protagonist is left feeling like an outsider, disconnected from the very essence of existence. This film is a heartfelt meditation on the universal human experience of isolation and the profound significance of connection. 8 Ball invites viewers to reflect on their own perspectives on belonging and interpersonal relationships

WAV is a physical card game consisting of “song” cards and “prompt” cards, in addition to a website platform. Each song card features the name of the song, artist, and a scannable Spotify code that leads to a digital version of the song. The objective of the game is to place one song card down that the player deems appropriate to the prompt, and one chosen member of the group determines which song best represents the prompt each round, thus determining the winner of the round. The game requires players to use headphones to listen to the song cards they pull, or play them out loud, which facilitates the music discovery process. The game is paired with a website that features articles, playlists, and resources to enhance the music discovery process while at the same time educating those who are interested in various topics including artist case studies, background on the digital age of music, breakdowns of samples, and history of specific genres of music.

technoinferno plunges participants into an immersive posthuman roleplay through virtual reality (VR), challenging perceptions of the corporeal form, reality, and the dichotomy between the digital and natural worlds. Through this experience, individuals are prepared for a world that transcends traditional distinctions between 'human' and 'technology,' seamlessly integrating both into a unified being. Inspired by Dante's Inferno, the experimental journey unfolds as a technoinferno, with each of its nine circles representing contemporary technological sins. As participants navigate this landscape, they delve into an exploration of repentance from human instrumentalism and the constraints of anthropocentric ideologies.

Market Maior is a UI/UX design prototype of a grocery delivery app that highlights UI/UX accessibility to the 55+ population. This topic is important and timely because we’re living through a transformation in which mobile apps represent our ways of living, and they’re still developing at a rapid rate. Having observed my grandparents’ insecurity navigating a digital lifestyle, my project and I hope to call for age-inclusive design thinking and application, a lens under the overarching inclusive design practice that is relatively less discussed. Market Maior will be showcased as a clickable prototype of a grocery delivery app that incorporates an option for the users of this grocery shopping app to switch to a more age-friendly interface. In addition, the app includes a built-in simulation game that syncs user data and rewards players with promotion codes to be used in later purchases to encourage cycling back from users to players, then players to users. In order to make the experience more entertaining, gamification is one of the most vital parts of Market Maior that involves research and experimentation. The project is designed with an iterative workflow bringing in user testing and iteration based on test findings, and the iterative process plays an active role in the project that is documented in a case study.

The Eyeire is a 30-Minute long medium-length film by director Jiacheng Wang. In a post-apocalyptic world and Buddhist dystopia, “The Eyeire,” where human desires are prohibited and repressed, Synesthesia is the only empath with hyper-human senses. Synesthesia searches for a cure to her sexual assault case on a revolutionary journey of gaze.

Jiacheng is an artist specializing in directing, visual arts, music composition, and screenwriting. Jiacheng’s work aims to capture the depth of human sensitivity through a cinematic visual kaleidoscope. In The Eyeire, Jiacheng desires to illuminate transcendental emotions that reflect what makes us human in the face of gendered violence, the male gaze, and the generational abuse of women.