This Interactive audiovisual installation is the 'afterglow' of an occupant's impact in space, both physical and perceived.

  
The room is reconstructed using light and sound, creating a constantly shifting perception of fluid space in flux, responding to the behaviour of the occupant. It captures the sound of viewers' steps to modulate it and visualizes it to shape the space in real-time.

  
The installation allows viewers to consider the boundary between tangible physical space and intangible perceived space from sensory perception, light and sound. We can be physically present in a space, but our minds constantly switch between and disconnect from different perceived spaces.

  
This project combines both the material and the immaterial to represent the dynamic of people's living experiences across differing spaces. The direct and indirect energies of light and sound switch between each other, creating a series of immersive spatial experiences. The impact of the initial energy of sound gently fades into indirect reflections and fades out, being replaced with light, illuminating the site and creating the 'afterglow'. Direct light flattens three-dimensional objects and frames the structure of the space, while indirect light leaks out subtly to imply the edge of the space.

  
When viewers step into the room, the afterglow of their impacts alters the space they are present and shapes sensory perception.

AfterGlow III

How do humans perceive borders? It can be a grey line on a satellite map; it can be a stamp and a date on the visa page of a passport; it can be rows of concertina wires mounted around the border wall stretching for miles; or it can be an unmarked stream meandering along the ravine. 

Each day, CBP agriculture specialists across the nation seize approximately 3,000 prohibited plants, animal byproducts, and seeds. Plants which are not compliant with the import and export legislation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES ) are confiscated. These plants are taken care of by The Plant Rescue Center program, initiated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1878. Each individual species is reviewed by the authority, then regularly assigned and sent to botanical gardens, arboretums, zoological parks, and research institutions in the United States.
Confiscation can happen for a variety of reasons: “not every plant is smuggled intentionally. Sometimes it is just a matter of not having the proper paperwork, just like people going border to border without visas," notes Kyle Wallick, a botanist at the U.S. Botanic Garden.

Throughout history, the displacement and transfer of plants and seeds around the world went hand in hand with the forced migration of human labor. Thus the very act of planting, gardening, and cultivating plants can be seen as a form of colonial violence. Ordering, naming, organizing and trading plant species has been integral to ordering the wealth of an empire since the eighteenth century. As a scientific discipline and a taxonomy, botany also became a vast and profitable enterprise as a consequence of the colonists’ exploratory voyages. If the capture and classification of exotic species reinforced the primacy of colonial systems of science over indigenous forms of knowledge, then the botanical garden itself becomes a colonial laboratory. Migrated plants, enacted as archetypes of the foreign, each project a colonial ideology. To this day, plants continue to be transferred from one garden to another, often for political and especially diplomatic reasons, yet it is the political system which imposes ever stricter border regulations regarding the import and export of native and non-native plant species.

Dendrobium sp. is an artistic research project supported by the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT. The project adopts a first-person perspective of a dendrobium plant, whose exact identity has not yet been confirmed by botanic experts. The CITES-restricted plant’s journey of dislocation is documented as a personal history: from the regulation and confiscation by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to its release and transfer to the Botanic Garden of Smith College. The viewer is moved through a series of field visits and investigations, exploring the plant's geographic origins, medical properties, cultural identities, international travel histories, pictorial representations in specimen archives, and its temporary home at the botanic garden.

The project takes the form of a book, printed by risograph on standard herbaria papers and bound by sewing threads and medical bandages. The design of the book is inspired by the way in which one specimen of dendrobium has been presented at Harvard University Herbaria, which is but one of 1,800 unidentified dendrobrium species in the world.

Random errors produced by the Riso printer - ink scuffs and misalignment under layers of printing plates - perfectly resonate with the shifts in and misrepresentations of the Dendrobrium plant’s identity throughout its attempted classification and continued displacement. The X-ray-like monochromes printed on the semi-transparent sheets are simulated 3D models generated from hundreds of 2D photographs of the plant and its surrounding environment in the botanic garden. The documentation aims to unfold the Dendrobrium’s memory of traversing temporal and geographical borders while constantly being scanned by surveillance cameras and X-ray detecting machines. 

As William J. Mitchell mentioned in The Reconstructed Eye, "The early development of the technology coincided with the era of space exploration, so digital imaging systems quickly began to play much the same role in twentieth-century voyages of discovery as topographic and botanical artists had played in 18th-century ones: they reported previously unseen marvels and inventoried potentially colonizable territory." In the context of a pandemic where voyage and discovery have been put on pause, observing the journey of this one Dendrobrium across borders asks us to consider: as supposedly global citizens, how should we respond to the colonial power structures embedded in border plant policing systems today? How do we disentangle the complex sociocultural, political, and ecological histories of planting and gardening? How might the history of plant migration inspire a new way of looking at human migration?

Dendrobium sp.

What define jewelry? Wearability? Precious material?


Drawing of penis with horse tail hair and human pubic hair.

Tail ≒ pubic hair ...?

Four Little Swans Study, 2020, single-channel video, 2 minutes. 
Camera: SJ Lee 
Performers: joshua Mccorrmick, Cherrie Yu, Giannella Yt, Jesse Meredith


A section of the ballet Swan Lake reperformed on four pairs of corndogs. 

Four Little Swans Study

The work was created during the epidemic period. Through the deconstruction of the urban landscape, a familiar and unfamiliar scene was created. The superposition and connection of various symbols were used to arouse the viewer's imagination of individuals and urban objects. Therefore, we can think about the relationship between individuals and groups, and the relationship between objects and space. It doesn't have any direction, it just tries to lead the viewer to think again about the way of life and how it will change in the future.


Ubiquitous streetscape

Lighitng Design showreel 2022

Daphne is a London-based multidisciplinary artist and lighting designer for interactive installations, spatial experiences, audiovisual arts and live performances. She has exhibited her art projects on the global stage and participated in over 200 lighting productions for arena-scale live events worldwide, including venues such as MGM Grand Garden Arena(Las Vegas), The O2 Arena(London), AccorHotels Arena(Paris), Qudos Bank Arena(Sydney), Singapore National Stadium, Stadium Negara(Kuala Lumpur), Nest-type Beijing Olympic Stadium. 

  
Her works combine visual/ sound art and technology to create interactive and immersive experiences. As a former researcher in the Interactive Architecture Lab, her research explores the disconnection between mind and body in tangible physical space and perceived space. She is interested in creating shifting perceptions of fluid space in continual flux through sensory perception to reshape people's experiences.

 New Media Art and Lighting Design Showreel 2023

Without people, cultures can't continue to evolve. It needs someone to actively engage with it, someone to interact with it, to bring it into meaningful existence.

  
Bring into Existence is an Interactive sound-visual installation that does not exist in any form until the moment someone interacts with it. The more the people move, the variety of sound, light, and projection with motion tracking opens up layer by layer, and when the audience stops moving, it goes back to its original state.

It invites the audience into the space to conjure the artwork to life. Each individual's identity and background create unique interactive interpretations through the one element that connects us all: movement. The audience becomes a conductor of sound, lights and visuals. Driving the artwork to its final crescendo to solidify the connection between creators and audience.

  
This project began at the tail end of 2022 with a conversation between Taiwanese new media artist Daphne Ting Yu Chu and Scottish musician Steven Morrison. Ideas of human connection, creativity and technology crafted the elements of this work. The artists wanted to create a work that only exists when interacted with. They shared their cultural backgrounds and discovered that humanity finds common connections that cross barriers, languages and societal norms. Movement, light and sound bond us all in some way, and become a part of our culture to open up more human experiences and connections.

  
Daphne Ting Yu Chu & Steven Morrison

Bring into Existence

Synaesthesia of Water is an interactive installation that combines the senses of touch, hearing, and sight. Viewers trigger the interaction between sound, lasers, and projections by dipping their hands into the water. It juxtaposes the touch of water with the abstract geometric forms of deconstructed water and digitally manipulated water sounds to forge a synesthetic connection across the different senses. Through this multi-sensory experience, Synaesthesia of Water highlights the subtle and sometimes jarring ways in which our senses can intertwine.

Synesthesia of Water 

Flow is an interactive lighting installation that was designed for a Taiwanese independent musician. The colour and pixels of LED strips dynamically follow the gestures of the artist.

  
This installation tried to interpret the concept of "going with the flow" in the song. The movement of the artist presents the flow in the music, and it's captured and visualized with lights that illuminate the scene and deliver the dynamic to the space in real-time. It allows the artist, music, performance and space to connect profoundly and seamlessly with interaction and present the "Flow" in all the scene's visual elements.

Flow

Each entity exists in parallel, seemingly entwined yet standing solitary. 

​

​"Parallel" is an interactive audiovisual installation in between performance and experience. It peels back the layers of existence to reveal the delicate balance between solitude and connection through different textures of light and sound. Parallel invites participants to engage by their movements, transforming discrete components into a living entity resonating with and responding to human interaction. We collected sound from moments of solitude, modulated it digitally based on participants' movements in real-time and visualised it with projection mapping and lights.

​

​Inspired by artists' migration experiences, it reflects themes of cultural integration and empathy, fostering social cohesion and mutual understanding. As we explore the interplay of light and sound, we redefine the boundaries of perception, casting light upon the depths of our shared experiences and emphasising the paradoxical beauty of interconnectedness.

​

Daphne Ting-Yu Chu & Teng Xue

Parallel

STRANGE IDEOGRAPH is an artist-AI-curated collection of strange mathematical structures, exploring the state space of four iconic 2D strange attractors.

STRANGE IDEOGRAPH

Inspired by Cymatics, PLASMATICS are 12 audiovisual dynamical patterns that mathematically explore the ideas of Vibration, Potential, and Emergence, based on c12's The Seeker musical scores.

  
Each PLASMATICS piece listens to its recursive audio piece in real-time, and decodes its vibrations/frequencies through Fast Fourier Transform, averaged through three different centroid distributions (linear, Bark, and Mel), and represented visually through an algebraic expression that approximates the Chladni Plate patterns (one variation of Cymatics) in three different layers. Each piece can alternate between PLASMA and PARTICLE mode by user input. PLASMA mode explores how emergent patterns appear through the convergence of potential positions. PARTICLE mode explores how vibration can be algebraically/physically expressed in striking and symmetric patterns, patterns which have inspired interesting conversations on the scientific and spiritual meanings of frequencies and sound.

  
https://thecolorblocks.co/plasmatics

PLASMATICS

Created for the Miami Art Week 2023 Immersive Art Exhibition. Sagamore South Beach | December 4-10\. Theme: Art Deco.

A snapshot of chaotic symmetry exhibited by the iterative function dx/dt = -(1+r)x + x², at range \[0.6721, 0.685\].

https://thecolorblocks.co/opulence

OPULENCE

130 mesmerizing chaotic symmetries, documenting the inscribed memories of the Logistic Map iterative function dx/dt = rx(1 - x), one of the most iconic equations in Chaos Theory.

BIFURCATION ARTEFACTS

Working primarily with images and objects, I am interested in the connectedness between humans and the surrounding environments in the overwhelmingly shifting urban scenes. I particularly look at the diaspora communities, seeking for cultural identities and collective histories embedded in the trivial occurrences. 

The five images from the series The Red Day, are titled "May There Be Surplus Year After Year", "Three Chi-Pao", "Wedding Cups and Cigarettes", "Chinatown Park ", and "Your New Year's Gold Call" respectively. They are digital drawings accidentally produced for an ongoing documentary photo project The New Chinatown Archive. During the Chinese New Year in 2019, I was fascinated by the visually familiar yet emotionally awkward hustle and bustle on the streets in Manhattan Chinatown in New York city. The sudden blurry vision happened to me on the streets, yet the camera captures the concrete reality by itself. Later, I decided to cover the original photographs with abstract color blocks as a means to resonate that complex layers of sensation and memories aroused during the holiday time. Exact objects and contexts of these artifacts are blurred, revealing a new way of seeing and feeling my existence as a knowledgeable yet strange tourist in a diaspora scene. 

The Red Day

Blueprint is a project I started in 2020. The traditional diazo blueline paper - commonly used in urban design, architectural and engineering drawings decades ago, becomes my new way of identifying and photographing the ordinary scenes of the urban landscapes and ever-shifting transitions of the city space. Exposing the light sensitive papers to replicate the city infrastructures, leftovers on the construction sites, traces of human livings and so on, I create my own archive of urban blueprint with life-sized abstract blueline images in different scales and shapes. Then, the familiar architectural structures in the urban scenes are decomposed and dramatically transformed into mini-sized blueprint slices, waiting to be re-discovered and re-exanimated by the residents. By transforming the subtle changes happening in the urban space and trivial occurrences of human beings by this old-fashioned photographic technique, I also attempt to engage with the passage of time and the ephemerality of urban settlements.

Blueprint

What define jewelry? Wearability? Precious materials?

Google "Higeta soy sauce_sheep" you will find connection of soy sauce and sheep


Drawing of soy sauce on sheep rag with hair clips

HIGETA soy sauce_sheep

What define jewelry? Wearability? Precious materials?

UKIYO-E porno skater

What define jewel? Wearability? Precious materials?

They are all real pearls btw

What define jewel? Wearability? Precious materials? 


CZ stones on sanding machine.

In the name of moon, I'll punish you!

"Shurangama Sutra" - 2021
Size: A2 - 594 x 420 cm / Digital painting


Shurangama Sutra 

Trio A Translation Project, onging, 36 minutes 40 seconds

Performers:  Enid Smith, Ignacio Morales, Tony Rodriguez, Dongmei Wang 

 
In summer 2020, I started translating Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 dance Trio A with a series of individuals with different professions and backgrounds. The individuals each had a loved person transcribe the original dance into a written score, which we worked with to devise new movements. During the rehearsal process, each performer produced writings which became the voiceover to the movements. The project takes the form of a film essay. In the order of appearance, Enid Smith, a former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Company, Ignacio Morales, a janitor at Inland Steel Building, Tony Rodriguez, a former Chicago fireman, and my mother. The project was completed during the 2020 pandemic and all filmed remotely in each performer’s home. The individual dances were accompanied by the performers reading their journal entries.


Trio A Translation Project

Cherrie and Matthew, 2019, performance, 15 minutes, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL 
Performers: Cherrie Yu, Matthew Lemus 
Video and sound recording: Julian Flavin

In this performance, I danced with Matthew Lemus, one of the performers from my film Lydia and Matthew.We reperformed materials from the film, as well as adding new sections in response to Trisha Brown’s Solos Olos, and Anne Teresa DeKeersmarker’s Come Out. The dances were intersected by monologues in which we talked about our experiences of collaboration. 

Cherrie and Matthew

Lydia and Matthew, 2019, 20:04 minutes. 
Performers: Lydia Feuerhelm and Matthew Lemus 
Camera: Wanbli Gamache, Armin Hayrapetian 
Sound: Armin Hayrapetian


Lydia and Matthew is a screen dance featuring a duet between the two performers Lydia Feuerhelm and Matthew Lemus. Lydia is a partner dancing teacher, and Matthew is a janitor at a high-rise residential building in downtown Chicago. I spent a month and a half working withLydia and Matthew separately, collecting their biographical information, performance histories, movement habits and life routines. In the end I put together a solo for each of them that corresponded with each other.

Lydia and Matthew

Trisha and Homer, 2018, single-channel video, 8:31 minutes. 
Camera: Katie Wood, Cherrie Yu 
Performers: Cherrie Yu,  Homero Muñoz, Sungjae Lee, Aram Atamian. 


Trisha and Homer is a three-part film consisting of found footage, performance for the camera, and documentary. In the film, the American dancer Trisha Brown’s 1986 performance Accumulation with Talking Plus Watermotor is followed by Homero Muñoz, a maintenance worker at work at Michigan Plaza in Chicago. Both performances were learned and re-enacted by the artist. In the third section of the film, Homero and the artist had a conversation about work, dance and music. 

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