2022
In collaboration with Paul Wang

[Detours & Deviations is an ongoing project. This post only shows its early development. All updates can be found on the project website.]

A place is shaped by not only the physical conditions but also the social, historical, and personal contexts – events, stories, and memories, which, like actors on the stage, generate different scenes from the same set with different interactions and arrangements. To visualize and experiment with this idea, we create a virtual environment that is constantly intertextually built, both with the actors (the AIs) and the participant (the player). The participant finds themselves at an exhibition about a rock. They cannot approach the rock but look at it either from different aspects or through gaps. The participant’s behaviors within the gallery interplay with the psychological contexts of the environment to reconfigure a room that represents the participant’s perceptions.

Drawings & Diagrams

In Detours & Deviations, the scenes and their “acts” are developed with “portraits” (artifacts like drawings and models) of specific memories and places. The process of portraying involves exploring materialities and performance. The events of representation were digitized and compiled into the virtual environment by intentionally including the physical qualities of the hand-built artifacts and the psychological aspects of the performance. For the prototypical scene of ANA (which was largely transformed in our current version), the virtual environment was mainly constructed with hand-crafted textures and photogrammetry of physical models and objects.