Thoughts while Working on the Project

The piece is inspired by an experience working at an educational aerospace exhibition in China, in which, I welcomed an average of five thousand children per day to play with a hologram I made. I was astonished by the attractiveness the hologram had upon children. I started to wonder what constitutes this “attractiveness”? The piece explores the aesthetics of the digital era, and my worships and concerns toward it.

Immersion and interaction are the two big words of our age, and they hold the aesthetic values of our generation. Unlike our parents who sit in front a television, and passively watch stories portrayed in films, my generation prefers constantly typing on keyboards and “participate in stories” in games.  To our generation, interactions is the fundamental quality of technology and entertainment. We are experts working with “inputs’, and “feedbacks”. We prefer social media over traditional media because we can make “inputs” by publishing blogs and writing comments. We are attracted to immersive technologies such as AR and VR because they allow us to use our whole body to make “inputs” and interact. The quality of being immersive and interactive are the aesthetics that we look at when evaluating technologies and everything else. People are more likely to spend thirty dollars on a 15 minutes VR experience than buying a non-interactive well-drawn painting. The piece is made with a projector and a motion sensor, which are the two-most-commonly-seen devices used for immersive and interactive entertainment, and it is a commentary on how our generation get attracted to these two qualities.   

This is piece is deeply influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s and his ideas about hyperreal and reality. Buadrillard believes simulation modifies and sometimes produces reality. In Simulacra and Simulation, he talks about a phenomenon which he calls as the “aesthetics of the hyperreal”. He writes, “One sees what the real never was (but ‘as if you were there’), without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but ‘more real than nature’) ”.  The is exactly what immersive and interactive technology provides to us. Hyperreal allows us to experience a distant reality or fantasy with our very own sensations, in other words, a low-poly world feels “more real than nature” when we have a VR headset on.  The produced world becomes part of our reality on a sensational level when we get full access to it. When a computer, or a simulation can influence and generate “reality”, it blurs the boundary between reality and the imagined, and shakes our belief system.