b a u h a u s

|| For this creative response assignment, we had to do a bauhaus-inspired design while putting the context of Singapore into consideration.

 

Something that is really iconic to Singapore is the void deck space. In the past, void decks used to be places where residents could gather and conduct social activities, but with the myriad of rules of placed on permitted activities and control of the usage of this space, most residents would not choose to spend their free time chilling in the void deck and bonding with their neighbours. Coincidentally, a while back I took a photo of a void deck at my house which reminded me of how barren and boring void decks are. Being a resident of the HDB high rise flats community, I have always wished for residents to be given a chance to exercise creative freedom in our own living spaces.

voiddeck(); photo by me

This led me to think about a potential place to start: l e t t e r b o x e s.

Uniform and made of cold aluminium (both figuratively and literally), their current design really does not do much but emphasise the desolation of the void decks. Some residents even choose to lock the slits of their letterboxes because they want to avoid spam advertisements from being shoved in. In my opinion, I think the saddest thing is that residents do not even send each other any greeting cards, or any forms of letters. :’D

http://www.namlee.com.sg/sites/default/files/styles/galleryformatter_slide/public/boonkeng_letterbox.JPG?itok=ot682C0l

 

Inspired by the features of Bauhaus design, which is the consideration of functionality with form, geometrical shapes that are simple for mass production, I came up with a potential design for letter boxes in void decks (below)! The letterboxes are in hexagonal shapes, which not only are a really strong structure based on physics, but also resembles a beehive and represents how residents are living in a community like bees would. (hexagons would also make a lot more space for slightly thicker mail). The shapes are all relatively rounded off so that they appear more organic and less stiff, and the use of vibrant primary colours would give a splash of liveliness and congeniality to the entire void deck area.

Bauhaus-inspired letterbox design by me (Yue Ling)

I would be so incredibly happy if this sort of design were to be a reality in the future. *shamelessly hypothetically patents own design* :’D

Although a void deck literally means empty level, I really doubt it has to remain as a purely empty space. Something like a Bauhaus letterbox design would definitely do much to bring a sense of playfulness and conviviality within the living spaces of Singaporeans.

A r t N o u v e a u

|| A r t N o u v e a u

 

 

This Art Nouveau abstract design is inspired mainly by the blue pea plant, which asides from its striking indigo colour, is also used for cooking Peranakan dishes. Other plant patterns featured are also related to the theme of food from different cultures, such as the pandan leaf plant, thyme and curry leaf plant.

 

(I took some photos but they are all too large to insert into this post but you can check some of them out on @noyumipic on Instagram. [ https://www.instagram.com/p/BoMjTJfna63/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet ] )

 

Noticeably, many of the plants featured an outward-growing pattern and so I incorporated that into my design using (almost) radial-symmetry. The botanical theme accompanied with symmetry serve to recall the Art Nouveau style.

 

Plant inspirations:

 

(taken by me) The blue pea plant is used to make a local desert called Nonya chang (see below) because of its natural blue pigment.
https://prod-c2i.s3.amazonaws.com/articles/1496108532592ccdf41b818.jpg

 

https://candy.com.sg/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Pandan-Leaves.jpg The pandan leaves of the pandan plant are used for their green pigment and fragrant taste and smell in local desserts like kueh salat (see below) and a bunch of other kuehs.

 

https://recipeswecherish.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Kueh-Salat-6.jpg

 

 

https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/server3700/fxxw4to/products/187/images/2141/Herbs_Fresh_Thyme_pkt__78184.1434805304.500.750.jpg?c=2 Thyme is a Western spice used for dishes like spaghetti. There are small leaves growing outwards on a stalk.

 

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0608/2413/products/Curry_leaf.jpg?v=1456769791  The curry leaf plant looks like the bigger version of thyme and is used for making dishes like… curry.

 

 

 

 

 

[Final Hyperessay] teamLab – Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018)

 

Image taken from: https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-l/16315 (edited)
teamLab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018)

One of teamLab’s most recent art installations Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018) is situated in Amos Rex, an art museum in Helsinki, Finland. It is just one of the many exhibitions that teamLab has globally in countries such as France, Japan, and even Singapore. teamLab is based in Japan and is an “art collective” of “ultra-technologists” that consists of engineers, programmers, CG animators, graphic designers, editors and many more positions and is headed by Toshiyuki Inoko. The interdisciplinary nature of their team is well-reflected in their art installations that often deal with using light as paint and the world as their canvas (Mun-Delsalle, 2018). teamLab utilises interactivity and advanced technology used in the development of hypermedia to blur the boundaries between the physical and virtual world and elevate the extent of immersion in Lost, Immersed and Reborn.

 

Interactivity is a forte of this installation, and further enhances its immersive quality. In Nobert Wiener’s Cybernetics in History, he discusses about the role of an artist as a ‘steersman’; a designer of a ‘catalyst’ that enables a stable reciprocal exchange between human and machine (Wiener, 1954) and we are able to project this concept unto the context of Lost, Immersed and Reborn.

 

Cybernetics in the context of Lost, Immersed and Reborn.
(by Tan Yue Ling)

 

In this digital interactive installation, a virtual ecosystem made of projected light fills up the entire room. Participants invited to interact with the myriad of virtual flora and fauna within by colouring in templates with contours of animals and flowers and scanning their drawings. Once their drawings are scanned, they are immediately transformed into animated graphics that appear three-dimensional and join the rest of the virtual ecosystem where participants are then able to illicit responses by ‘touching’ them. The flora and fauna to which they react differently when ‘touched: the animals within the ecosystem can ‘eat’ each other, if participants do not move, more flowers will grow, if participants step on the animals, they explode into a splat of colours. teamLab uses light as canvas, essentially incorporating real life characteristics of nature into this virtual ecosystem.

 

How it works:

 

The idea of entropy within this piece is evident with how teamLab partially gives up ownership of the artwork to participants, who have the freedom to create and interact with whichever virtual element to illicit whatever response they chose to evoke. teamLab’s use of sensors reminds me of John Cage’s Variations series, whereby kinaesthetic sensors were used to record and evoke different artistic outcomes. In Variations V, the dancers were the participants who created different sounds using their movements while in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, the public are the participants who created different visual outcomes within the space using their movements which are similarly detected by sensors.

 

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/assets/img/data/1785/bild.jpg

Since participants’ actions were unpredictable,  the visual dynamic of the room was constantly changing in an unprogrammed and indeterminate manner, in the sense that every other day, the change in the room’s appearance would be different from the day before. With reference to Roy Ascott’s quote on interactive art:

“Interactive Art must free itself from the modernist ideal of the “Perfect Object.” (Ascott, 1966)

teamLab has successfully facilitated an organic outcome in Lost, Immersed and Reborn resulted from the unpredictability of participant’s actions, something that would not be achievable without the participation of both man and machine. Giving participants the responsibility of creating the artwork heightens its immersive factor since participants feel like they exist in and are able to affect the virtual world.

 

Undoubtedly, technology is the backbone of teamLab’s artworks, including Lost, Immersed and Reborn. The state-of-the-art technological devices that teamLab employs bank on a long history of technological development. Earlier works such as Sensorama were limited by the level of advancement in technology.

Sensorama by Morton Heilig http://www.mortonheilig.com/InventorVR.html

In Sensorama (which was launched in 1960) although technological features such as chemical smell simulation and binocular vision was incorporated, interactive features like a knob or joystick which would translate physical force into a response in the virtual world was largely absent. This made the experience still rather passive and consequently less immersive.

A later example of Aspen Movie Map (launched in 1978) had a touchscreen function which enabled participants to make associative and non-linear choices along the drive route. However, there were still limitations such as only enabling the participant to view the route in intervals of 10 feet and only being able to move in a fixed number of directions and made it hard for participants to be fully immersed in the virtual driving experience.

Aspen Movie Map http://www.inventinginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Aspen_armchair.jpg

In contrast to these rudimentary works, the advancement of technology has achieved immense amount of success in enabling the recreation of elements of reality into the virtual world. Current new media is able to expand the physical world by transcending its boundaries. teamLab uses software such as Unity to generate three-dimensional graphics from the scanned images in Lost, Immersed and Reborn.  In this way, art is transferred from a physical medium to a digital medium that acts as a representation of participants’ telepresence in this virtual ecosystem. The virtual ecosystem also acts as an ‘informational surrogate’ (Fisher, 1989) that stores a large volume of digital data that helps to mimic nature in a digital medium, for example how the movements of a lizard are replicated in the virtual environment. The flattened three-dimensional graphics also showcase teamLab’s “Fold, Divide or Join” principles of viewer centricity inspired by the concept of Ukiyo-e as Japanese ultra-subjective space, essentially creating a stereoscopic and kinaesthetic visual within a physical room to better simulate a first-person immersive experience.

“Multiple points of view places an object in context thereby animating meaning.” – Scott Fisher in Virtual Environments (Fisher, 1989)

The hardware used in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, includes the use of stereoscopic sound devices, light projection and sensors, which allow participants to be immersed seamlessly into the organic virtual ecosystem, choosing where they want to go and where they want to touch to evoke a response. The pace at which the animals move or respond is controlled by the participants, and not passively moving in a programmed manner at a fixed time interval. With the help of technology, the potential for an installation to grow as an ‘informational surrogate’ becomes immense and the number of possible ways to duplicate reality increases as well.

This can be best represented by the Reality-Virtuality Continuum (below) which presents the entire possible spectrum of immersive works as a category:

A representational figure of the reality-virtuality continuum as proposed by Proposed by Milgram and Kishino in A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays (1994).

It can be observed through previous VR works that as time passes, developments in technology allow for the creation of more complex systems featured in installations that expand the boundaries of computer-human interface towards invisibility, essentially pushing more VR works towards the direction of reality (i.e. augmented reality games like Pokemon Go or camera filters). As an installation that incorporates virtual reality (VR), Lost, Immersed and Reborn is eligible to be considered on the reality-virtuality continuum (Milgram, Paul & Kishino, Fumio, 1994) (Fig. 1) as augmented virtuality since it incorporates real time information into a largely virtual world. 

In Lost, Immersed and Reborn, there are various modes of interaction including scanning, touch sensors and sound by which physical force translates to digital response. However, many elements that could potentially make it “The Ultimate Display” (Sutherland, 1965) which is defined to be “a room which a computer can control the existence of matter”.  The perfect sandbox would give complete liberty in terms of decision making, engage all five senses and resemble reality so closely that there is suspension of disbelief without thought. teamLab’s design philosophy of bringing people together and co-creativity reflect extremely well in Lost, Immersed and Reborn, even if it’s within a virtual space. Perhaps in future artworks, teamLab might be able to explore the incorporation of other cues that engage more senses simultaneously such as smell and taste; the possibilities of immersion to explore are virtually endless.

 

Resources:

 

Careers | teamLab / チームラボ. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.teamlab.art/careers/

Mun-Delsalle, Y. (2018, August 13). Japanese Digital Art Collective TeamLab Imagines A World Without Any Boundaries. Retrieved September 7, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2018/08/13/japanese-digital-art-collective-teamlab-imagines-a-world-without-any-boundaries/#6d884bd554af

Wiener, N. (1954). Cybernetics in History. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.

T. (2018, August 29). Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccLykuaNSo&t=9s

Roy Ascott, “Behavioral Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” 1966, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

Ultrasubjective Space | teamLab / チームラボ. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.teamlab.art/concept/ultrasubjective-space

Fisher, S. (1989). Virtual Environments. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.

Milgram, Paul & Kishino, Fumio. (1994). A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. IEICE Trans. Information Systems. vol. E77-D, no. 12. 1321-1329.

Ivan Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” 1965, Wired Magazine

[Artwork selection] Teamlab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn

Teamlab: Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn
https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-l/16319

 

It was tough choosing an artwork from Teamlab’s amazing range of works but I have settled for their Graffiti Nature – Lost, Immersed and Reborn that best exhibits the aspects of interactivity, hypermedia and immersion.

 

Medium:

Paper, crayons/colour pencils, Unity, projection mapping, sensors.

 

How it works:

 

Participants are able to colour in a stencil of aplant or an animal such as a lizard or frog. Their own personalised plant or animal will then be scanned and digitalised, essentially transforming them into virtual beings that join other animals in a virtual ecosystem that fills up the entire room, submerging participants with the experience of being in a whole new world. Participants are then able to interact with the digitalised animals and plants by making contact with them on the surface of the wall or floor, through the help of sensors. Within this virtual ecosystem, the animals can either replicate or be eaten up by other animals, simulating the nature of wildlife in real life.

 

Sources:

[1] https://www.teamlab.art/w/graffiti_nature_reborn/

[2] (Youtube video) Graffiti Nature by Teamlab

Artist Selection: teamLab

Universe of Water Particles on Au-delà des limites
https://www.teamlab.art/images/pc-m/14757

 

For my Final Research Hyperessay, I am stoked to find out more about teamLab, an artist collaborative group based in Japan that currently is having one of their exhibitions Future World in Singapore! Since I’m taking Viscomm and Programming, I find their works really relevant and hope to learn more about their design philosophy.

The Start of Design

Design started back in the cavemen times. When society first began, design was born out of the need to get it to function and make it easier for people to carry out tasks. Be it for cooking and rituals, where pottery was needed, to transportation, where wheels were invented, to mysterious structures like the Stonehenge, people had to refine design decisions to get society functioning more efficiently.

 

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_architecture

 

https://www.google.com.sg/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi5-dOJwOncAhWJsY8KHdEFClEQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcontent.time.com%2Ftime%2Fspecials%2Fpackages%2Farticle%2F0%2C28804%2C1843821_1843820_1843808%2C00.html&psig=AOvVaw30QlLgW9yoDp2Xi5faRYjP&ust=1534231555003077

Experimental Fashun

 

– The Premise –  

———-

|| Using the social broadcasting platform of Facebook live, my group decided to do an interactive project called ‘Experimental Fashun’ (‘Fashion’ stylised as ‘Fashun’). We split our group of four into pairs whereby one person will be the ‘interviewer’ and the other will the ‘model’. The model’s homework is to select 5 pieces of apparel for a number of sections, namely: tops, bottoms, dresses, accessories and shoes. She will then write down a vague adjective describing the clothing. The ‘interviewer’ will have to engage and collect responses from members of the public from different parts of Singapore to participate in our project. The audience member will have to help the ‘model’ to select pieces of clothing to form their own unique combination. Since the descriptors are rather vague, it mirrors the unpredictable quality of online shopping, whereby we trust frequently vague descriptors and pick from cheap websites like Lazada or Ezbuy. From the selected combinations, we will then photograph proper photos of the whole outfits, pair them in categories of the stereotypes of the different parts of Singapore, and post them on Instagram and add the #experimentalfashun so that users of Instagram can vote for their favourite combinations.

 

Link to video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dscw9ljl2ncnhpk/main_FINAL.mp4?dl=0

 

 

For this project, our interviewers Bala and Felicia headed down to the following places respectively:

Bala – Sim Lim Square, Bugis Street

Felicia: Bras Basah Shopping Complex, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Lasalle College of the Arts

while Farzana and I were the models camping at home. We waited prepared sets of clothings to show the strangers that were interviewed what they looked like. After the outfits were chosen, we had to take pictures of the full outfit for the Instagram feed.

 

– Wardrobe Selections –

———-

Tops: cat, skeleton, checkered, tea, floral

Outerwear: thin (black), hipster weeb(the purple one), woolen, mint,thick
Dresses: checkered, CNY, pleated, floral, zebra
Accessories: Soft toy, ukelele, cap, beanie, glasses
Bottoms: navy (skirt), oriental, striped, PJs, oriental

 

– The Experience –

———-

During the execution of the Facebook live with Bala, I initially tried to make the clothing in the list as crazy as possible so that the participants would have some pretty crazy descriptors to choose from. However, what we didn’t expect is for them to take the task so seriously! A lot of them were really squinting at the descriptors, trying to clarify and asking for more details so that they could make the most suitable outfit to go for an actual party. This was a lot more significant at Bugis Street where there more more fashionable young people hanging around on a Sunday evening.

“What’s ‘tea’?”

Also, we initially intended to put on the outfit immediately after the participant had chosen the outfit, but after we interviewed the first person in Sim Lim Square, we had an awkward moment where the person had to wait for me to change, which probably took about 2 minutes, but there was still a certain social tension that existed even over the Third Space, which was really interesting to observe.

Bala was frantically trying to occupy the stranger while temporarily went off-screen to change.

This project was influenced by Blast Theory’s principles of integrating the physical and virtual world together through the use of new technology and inviting audience participation that would influence the outcome of the project, with an element of an immersive narrative. In our project, we set our premise as a fashion showdown modelled after RuPaul’s Drag Race or Project Runway, but incorporating digital elements! Not only did we empower the random participants to be designers themselves, we also involved the Instagram public to pick their favourite outfit to win the fashion show by posting polls

Our Instagram feed!

Experimental Fashun was influenced by the concepts of the dynamics of social interaction over the Third Space through social broadcasting, DIWO, and Digital Identity.

Inspired by our Telestroll project, we utilised the medium of Facebook Live to carry out an interview-style social broadcast with members of the public. We explored the concept of DIWO by getting them to make our fashion decisions for us. This links to how we allow others to alter our Digital Identity as well, since clothes are probably the most representative subject of appearance, or how you present yourself to others. Personally, I felt like this project really got me out of my comfort zone as well because I usually do not post a lot of Outfit-of-the-day (OOTD) posts on Instagram or Facebook since I’m not really into fashion myself, and my usual style is super stay-home casual.

By putting on wacky outfits and posting them onto our public Instagram page, I felt like I was allowing my digital image to be altered, and it probably is easier to believe that I’m comfortable putting on weird clothing while I was actually really kind of anxious at the thought of wearing them out in public, especially when we had to shoot the photos of the OOTDs, but I thought that after this experience, I’ve gotten pretty numb to any judgement.

Interestingly enough, we also unintentionally experienced the glitches in human behaviour and technology that we learned would eventually surface when we trapped ourselves in the Third Space for long enough, through the works of Annie Abrahams. The main point is that things would never go the way we intended for them to, for example, with that long awkward waiting time I mentioned above, as well as moments when connection was bad as we moved to different locations so it impaired the communication of the interviewer and model during the Facebook live. In the aspect of human-technology relationships, we also explored the mismatch in expectations in online shopping where you might put your trust in a supplier who you have never bought before, purely based on the pictures and descriptions that they provide, and so the products that you purchase may not end up as what you expected, since you never once inspected the product physically beforehand.

 

Online shopping websites such as Ezbuy, Lazada and Wish often offer cheap clothing with clickbait product names (just look at the amount of adjectives in there). We don’t ever know if they actually will fit us, we just see if they look good on the models, and have our perceptions swayed by reviews by other people.

 

 

In conclusion, a lot of negotiation was needed to overcome issues, from the conceiving of the idea, to the execution of it, to dealing with unintended glitches. Our outcome for the project also divulged interesting results; we found out that the older demographic preferred brighter colours compared to the younger demographic, and that people in different parts of Singapore had different attitudes towards fashion. We had involved others into our project, be it as a designer who came up with all the wacky combinations, or fashion director who got to say ‘ay’ or ‘nay’ to the outfits, and successfully executed our online fashion project, Experimental Fashun!

 

 

 

 

  • Summarize by stating how your final project explored the idea of the social and how you designed an interactive experience that included both artist and viewers.