Small Aspirations
2022-2023Small Aspirations uses critical play theory to expose and subvert the contradicting perceptions and realities of immigration labor. I draw from both the traditional form of play (e.g., three object play) as well as video game play (e.g., puzzler) to inform the design of a virtual reality experience taking place in overlooked public, private, and domestic spaces: a restaurant, a construction site, a bathroom. I am fascinated by how a modern still-life painting can convey the ephemerality of dreams as well as the brevity of human life in the particular context of immigration and migration. I am inspired by the fortune-telling custom in which a baby is given three objects to choose from on their first birthday, each of which symbolizes a path the child aspires to follow when they become adults. It is a custom that is not American, but our culture deeply ingrains that labor defines a person's worth, especially if they are first-time immigrants.
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Augmented Reality Wayfinding And Identity System For Queer Art at the Museums
2023In collaboration with Elise Coatney & Chenin Rowe
Through augmented reality typography, Amorphous bridges the gap between physical and digital spaces through a compact learning experience for queer art activists and enthusiasts, consisting of an identity and wayfinding system and a digital archive. The experience is designed to blend seamlessly into traditional as well as alternative and guerilla exhibitions, transforming the printed descriptions on the wall into a portal of sorts, leading visitors to a larger network of curated similar or related queer works. Using the portable and powerful mobile device, onsite wayfinding and offsite exploration are both possible.
Amorphous is an 8-week project funded by an internal grant at California Polytechnic State University's College of Liberal Arts to hire and mentor undergraduate students on a creative and scholarly research project.
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Pre-arrival
2021-2023An Extended Reality (XR) immersive experience into a digital typography experimentation of the geometry of the lights and shadows. It depicts the journey of undocumented immigrants in a poetic spatiotemporal typographic landscape built on the words of the poem The New Colossus by American Poet Emma Lazarus. The experience is built using the Unity Engine.
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Transitional Threads
2023In collaboration with Amanda Stojanov (https://amandastojanov.com/)
An immersive virtual reality experience about migration as a complex multigenerational process in which the player interacts with sculptural types that carry sentimental meanings. Each of these words that we wrote together is a word that tells our story in two parts: one of us leaving from elsewhere, and the other arriving from elsewhere, both wanting to be truly at home here in the United States.
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Immigration Documentation
How we treat each other is based on not only our social interactions, but on how political structures shape our perceptions of people. As technology takes on a greater role in that structure, I examine how it carries patterns of bias and discrimination that need to be interrupted. In addition to demonstrating the personal aspect of the legal immigration process, I also wanted to demonstrate how it is subtly dehumanizing at the same time. Mobile technology bridges the gap between abstract processes and petitioners, but it also reduces individuals to a few lines of legal fee receipts. With the help of a tracking system that compares "non-citizens" to consumer products, the entire person is distilled into data, barcodes, and numbers. I am interested in the larger picture of immigration being more than just physical borders. Human bravery will overcome obstacles to a better life for as long as poverty, inequality, war, and inaccessibility remain.
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