Φ (2023)

in collaboration with Kelsey Chen and Nicolai Dorka

Dimensions Variable. A compilation of vignettes filmed with a handheld microscope of human skin, leaves, and fiber, as well as live microscopic scans of volunteers’ skins recorded during the showcase is projected on one screen. A motion-tracking interactive display component is projected onto another screen wrapped around the audience. The audience’s movement is input into a TouchDesigner engine to generate visuals of tissues, membranes and surfaces with porous borders, based on their silhouettes, relying on computer vision-based edge detection algorithms.
During Metaspore Fellowship (co-taught by Anicka Yi, Remina Greenfield and Miguel Novelo), I became interested in the world as surfaces–borders, our own bodies as permeable territories. Through my collaboration with Kelsey Chen and Nicolai Dorka, we made Φ, an installation that notices all things as soft zones. The installation is a nomadic patchwork of decaying and growing biofilms, a sculptural sensory organ and projection surface. It's an observation of how things spill across; how environments inside and outside are not so separated as they may appear and a reconsideration of the human body as open place of meeting, an environment, a substrate, an interpenetrated and co-constituted weave of many kinds of other beings.

(You might be interested in how my awesome collaborator thought about the project on: Kelsey’s website)