Year 1

Year 2

About

Labyrinths

Labyrith is a game-like tool (or tool-like game) which, like some Photoshop filters, you can play with as well as use. It is a tool for constructing and experiencing non-linear narrative, in which you can explore narratives in a space instead of line-by-line reading like a book. There are three major components in Labyrith: narrative space, narrative element, and narrative spot. In the narrative space the user can construct or explore a narrative; a narrative consists of narrative elements such as sounds and words; a narrative element is not active unless it is in the range of the narrative spot, which the user can move or adjust its range to explore in the narrative space.

By moving and adjusting the size of the narrative spot, by changing the position, the path, and the speed of different elements, and by adding new and subtracting old elements, the process of signification through such playful explorations is at least as interesting as the end result. The narrative contents in this labyrith of symbols and time are thereby dynamic.
 

Intertext Explorer

"In user interface design, less is generally more. For example, you could get the user's attention with loud alarm sirens and big animated banners, but that would be just a bit over the top. Instead, Script 2.4 shows how to create a nice, tasteful alert window. Now you know why the authors don't work for Wired magainze."
--Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, Javascript for the World Wide Web, P15

Suppose a reader simply need the javascript code for making an alert box, all the information he/she will need in the paragraph above is simply "Script 2.4 shows how to create a (nice, tasteful) alert window." He/she may not have any interest (or time) to know the authors' preferences on interface design. In similar ways, you, the reader, may grow impatient reading this text!!

Well, dear reader, Intertext Explorer is a reading tool that allows the user to choose the "level" of reading a practical text. For example, the user may choose the level of "topic sentence", and can thereby scan through the main points of a text before choosing whether to read in detail. The "levels" are to be defined initially by the author or editor, and the reader can then use the different functions to set custom "levels", highlight keypoints, take notes, and search for keywords.
 

Taking the Line for a Walk

(1) Drawing with air: Blow-Interface: The user draw (as usual) with the awkward mouse, but blow a propeller or a tube on the monitor to change the brush, ie, a man-powered airbrush.

(2) Taking the Line for a Walk: the Drawing Robots: Initially we imagine this scenario: a cat chasing a mouse chasing a piece of cheese on a moving robot, and each of them as a pencil attached. (see the sketch) We wonder what kind of drawing will such interactions produce. We ended up making 3 robots (partly because the Work In Progress show at the RCA doesn't allow any real animal!), each of which can transmit as well as receive light. They are either attracted by light or afraid of it, and when they receive a light above a certain intensity, they draw by leaving a trail of their movements on the floor. While their interact with themselves, the user can also influence their behaviours by shining a flashlight towards them. Thus the resulting drawing is a product of behaviours, external information, and user interaction.
 

tScheduler

Hence I do not wish to cover such high practical tool with a "poetic" skin, instead, I set out to design a scheduler which is also a critique of schedulers; above all, I intend to expose the virtue of schedulers -- its functionality and precision -- to an extent that it is also laughable. The poetics and meaning will then derive from its absurdity.

I come up with a scheduler which is similar to a Turing Machine, model of a universal computer which consists of a "black box" and a long paper tape. Schedules are recorded as symbols onto the paper tape, and at each time interval the black box reads a symbol for the tape, and display accordingly the schedule the symbol represents. I make it so accurate that you can assign every second of time with a task, which the black box will display on time, with eerie mechanical sounds. The user of schedulers may then find some similarities between himself and the mechanical black box while laughing at it.
 

Eichstätt

The Garden at Eichstätt, a 17th century botanical book, provides the elements for the diversity of plant forms. Flowers, fruits, leaves, stems, and roots are first digitally scanned and stored individually, and later on to be recomposed dynamically using algorithms. Algorithms for branching, flowering, and decay regulate the growth of the plant. Shaking the monitor, the plant trembles and its leaves and stems will fall; plugging into different jars, the virtual plant transforms to different species; taking the suction cup off screen, the plant drops and is destroyed.
 

Tumtum Tree

A weird ancient Greek philosopher once argued that anything that moves has a life: so, in motions too, The animated pot-plant becomes more "alive". Other possibilities, of course, include ritual dances and pollen dispersion by taking a stroll in the park!
 

Dissertation