My Role

Creative Technologist, Interaction Designer

Team

Jeff Crouse / Art director, Arduino Input, Jason Chen / Coding, Syphon, 3D Modeling, Joyce Zheng / 3D Modeling, Liu (Lio) Chang / Camera Design (Cinemachine), Nana Chen / Props Design, Junyao Liu / Level Design (Gaia & GeNa), Ray LC / Level Design (Gaia & GeNa)

The initial idea starts from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) by Neil Postman, which talks about a contemporary phenomenon in which the public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement.

We envision a post-human world and discuss how mainstream media is going to remain in nature. In this immersive experience, the audience stand in the dystopian forest. They can feel and observe surroundings through both virtual effects and physical TVs, while also being part of the media content themselves(a webcam is live monitoring their actions to do the broadcast).

The gallery space composed by a large projection on the wall, three old-school CRT monitors, a custom-made remote controller, and real-entity soil with leaves and rocks. Once the audience gets into space, they are facing to a continuously moving forwarding view in this special forest. There is various popular content display in the old TVs placed randomly in the forest. On the physical screen on the plinth, the same content plays as the virtual screens.

The audience can adjust their moving speed and the angle of the sight view through the physical remote controller. But, they cannot stop going forward. There is no ending during this journey, whenever is the day or night, rainy or foggy.

I created the back-end technology of camera settings for this installation. It was combined the cinemachine and animation design in Unity3d. Connecting with Arduino to control the first-person view flowing, creates the feeling of being trapped inside the television.