This piece chronicles one of my recurring childhood nightmares, in which colorful shapes terrorized me and I would wake trapped in sleep paralysis with a haggard figure standing over my bed. Made with Adobe Illustrator
[ID: 10 paneled strip of drawings with shapes and swirls of bright rainbow colored gradient in motion around a figure with a short blue bob and tan skin and an olive colored short sleeve shirt. The last drawing feature creepy green hands reaching from the abyss. ]
As I was rooting around my house for materials, I found a bucket of paper cranes that I had folded when I was in elementary school. As a child, I was convinced that if I folded a thousand paper cranes, I would be granted a wish, like in the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr. Though my nine year old self did not have the stamina to fold that many cranes at once, I have continued to fold little paper cranes out of gum and candy wrappers, receipts, sticky notes, expired coupons, and whatever other scraps of paper I have with me. Now, I treat them as physical sigils of good luck, and some part of me still believes in them.
[ID: 1. an asortmant of colorful spikey paper cranes in a sculptural pile on a white background.
2. a pile of colofrul paper cranes with chrystals growing on them.
3. a close-up of pink chrystals growing on the paper cranes.
4. a long string of colorful paper cranes which hangs over a pile of paper cranes. ]
eden 2.0 is a fantasy garden that challenges notions of space and gravity. The room constantly flips – causing the ground to alternate between the sky and a grassy plane. When a viewer is standing on the sky, the trees above mimic a rainforest canopy, and when the room flips, the viewer finds themselves standing amongst the trees, looking up at a tent in the sky. The walls of the room are projected with a lush StyleGAN artificial intelligence that is trained on a dataset of plant life and architecture. Viewers can also explore the inside of the tent, which is projected with a StyleGAN output trained on a dataset of fruit, mold, and organs. Made Spring 2020 in Motion 24 @ UCLA Design|Media Arts.
[ID: 3:26 minute long animation of rotating room with a 3D modeled tent and figure. An AI generated video trained on nature images is projected on the room and its objects. Feauturing the song "Plantasia" by Mort Garson.]
This project was made for Design|Media Arts 24: Motion at UCLA. For this assignment, I wanted to compare the methods of motion for different animals and see what commonalities they might share. For instance, a frog mid-leap becomes a eagle. In order to bring focus exclusively on their movements, the animals are represented by simplistic rounded shapes and skeletal armatures. The animals appear in the following order: human, emperor penguin, Labrador retriever, tree frog, bald eagle, and horse.
[ID: 1:39 minute long abstract animation of wireframe animal and human figures walking and moving in their natural state.]
