How I Become a
Punch Card
2024
8
shaft table loom, algorithm, workstation, globe, work
suits, essential electronics
How I Become a Punch Card delineates a feedback loop between the earliest
and the latest machine considered as computers, activated by a human medium as
a necessary gear.
The algorithm perpetually generates maps and delivers weaving instructions with text, and binary codes. They are translated onto the weavings by a human loom operator, who redraws globe as an after-work diary.
The role of humans as the dominator, and machine as the subordinate has been reshuffled, switched over, their minds collide.
Spiritual Play: The Crusades
2023
multi-media installation
Spiritual Play: The Crusades is a
multimedia installation that combines cartography, collections of badges,soundscape, text pieces, and kinetic
sculpture, with an intense focus on videogame and its spiritual dimensions. Referring to the Crusades, a spiritually driven military pilgrimage, a conquest to
the religiously different other, this project invites the audiences to play the role of a pilgrim. While
telling this story about the journey of pilgrimage to themselves, they become
the other as opposed to their identityin reality, and experience spirituality in
games without becoming a believer of specific religion. Built on Johan Huizinga’s articulation of war as a form of play, the ludic
identity construction theory from Playful Identities, and Stef Aupers’ spiritual
play theory, the project examines these theories in practice. This project is
fueled by my interest in the video game Europa Universalis IV and the Crusades King V,
games that prominently feature map as projections of players’ desire to conquer. Similarly, my project began as a mapping endeavor to provide the
instruments for playful readings and fantasizing.
The first map I made was Antioch City Plan. This map is part of a greater cartographic endeavor to map all the strategically and relighiously significant cities during the Crusades, and their surrounding topography. I began by training myself to be a soviet Union military cartographer, and simultaneously explore the specifc way they encode human-inhabited space, to contemplate the topics of war, spirituality, nationlism, knowledge system, and fictional narratives.
Heroic Moment - Prologue
2022
Instruction, Silicone, Hydro Stone, Rigid Urethane, Packaging Bubbles, Prints, Dice, Game Table, Tablecloth, MDF wood
Heroic Moment
- Prologue initiates the idea with a board game set
a half year ago and Heroic Moment concludes it with a mobile box that is
supposed to encapsulate the game set, reflecting my on-going research and
thinking on critical game theory, hero theory, and self-inquiry into my fluid
childhood perception of “hero”.
Modified based on Senet, Heroic Moment -
Prologue is a competitive board game between two players and requires the
players to perform a specific finger gesture in order to play. It is created in
2022.
My childhood close friend and I came up
with this finger gesture to satisfy our desire to play the role of something
greater, cooler, wilder than who we are, and something that can be acted and
interact with different environments yet still contains ourselves in it. Aging
from 9 to 14, I put my bizarre fantasy drawn from East Asian cultural products
into the self-directed theatre for myself being the only audience, imagery
involving a hero, monster, God, dragon, landscape, architecture, my success and
frustration in real life, and my imagination towards females. In these imagined
plays, I enjoy the simultaneous sensations of playing the role of a hero, while
looking at the person I am playing as a spectacle. My self-inquiry about this
feeling led me to an ancient Egyptian board game called Senet, which provides a
set of rules that enable similar kinds of interactions between two players and
observers.