Skip to main content

PO1 : Final Installation

 


Black River

Media Installation

Audio & Video Sculpture



Black River is a media installation exploring displacement and the longing for a deep connection towards a kind of homeland. At its center is an Inflatable Crocodile—a puppet trapped in an unending karaoke performance, forever singing a song about its life. Though it has no voice, its presence suggests an eternal loop of longing, echoing unheard stories of loss.


The work humanizes this fictional creature, evoking empathy and prompting reflection on our own connections to land. It investigates shifting ecological baselines—the way in which each living generation perceives nature’s decline as their “normal.” As ecosystems collapse, what we consider natural keeps shifting, obscuring what we’ve lost. Within this narrative, the crocodile longs for its polluted homeland and to be with other mutated crocodiles. Dwelling in a post-climate apocalypse where remnants of human industries remain and pollution becoming our final legacy.





This media installation incorporates the sculpture I made for the Bespoke Object Project, to create a mascot/puppet sculpture to drive the emotional aspect the work.









For the animated karaoke component I used the same model and rigged it in blender and animated using QuillVR. The song involved in this narrative was another layer of complexity, I personally have never written a song and this project was a great start to get there. I started by creating a prose about my life and took key points and used it to make the phrases on the song. My friend Julie Olive was kind enough to collaborate with me on this project and provided the vocals and composed the guitar melody for this song. Overall I was really trying to work in the satirical aspect of this song but I also wanted to the viewer to empathize. Julie's folk rendition of this song was just the icing on the cake. 












Comments

Popular posts from this blog

OBDF 310 Milestone: Stacked Slices Laser cut Final

  This week in my Object design class, we were able to finalize out designs for laser cutting slices. My penguin model has gone through a couple of design adjustments mostly to have a cleaner and readable structure. simplifying the model makes it easier to distinguish, spherical curves on the original brep reference doesn't seem to provide appealing slices so I decided to go with a more geometric form. Once processed through grass hopper I didn't have a need to include wings because the tapered form still translates to something that appears like a wing.   On the left are the initial slices, the right is the cleaner side decided to mirror to create a more readable model. Above is the layout for laser cutting, I ended up layering the cut-outs manually because the grid method shown in last weeks class was quite troublesome. I just couldn't figure out how to pull of the grid placement on vector direction and didn't want to spend too much time confusing myself. (The penguin...

P02: Proposal

“Mass Produced Object”    Project Proposal:   To create medium scale wind-sock/kite in the shape of a Whale Shark. The purpose of this object is to act a metaphor for optimism in a video performance with a working title called “I see in you a thousand stars”. In this performance I am dragging the wind-sock through a bleak environment attempting to capture essences of “hope” within the air. Currently within my practice I have been interested in deep ecology, and one of its aspects is to anthropomorphize “more-than humans” as agents for empathy and connectedness. In this performance am borrowing the image of the Whale shark as a vehicle for change. This organism is a keystone species found in tropical waters and is important to carbon sequestration, through massive carbon storage through its mass and recycling nutrients for other marine life. Kites have a cultural significance in South East Asian cultures, as a symbol for celebration, freedom, and religious beliefs. They ar...

Algorithmic Surface Modelling

  This week surface morph animation and some extra stuff.  Starting out with a divided curve I was able to use it determine points for circles and then using said circles to loft a structure. I then utilized the random numbers to offset the radius for each section in the loft and by utilizing "replace item" I was able to move a circle around the geometry. To show this variating animation without changing the seed values in the random numbers node. Bonus: Sending Grasshopper data via OSC/UPD to other programs I really wanted to use the program in conjunction with my main creative tools just to give me more reasoning to use grass hopper. You can utilize geometry in grass hopper and use them on other programs like MAX msp and Touch Designer for live visual effects or any other use cases. But as a caution try to re-mesh the models or simplify,  because grasshopper uses a lot of data and sending them live can cause it to crash if the models are too complicated.  Geometry ...