Interviews with students about their work and experience of the programme.
What is the motivation behind your work for the final exhibition?
Wei Lin @weilin8553 & Tianyuan @tianyuan_zhang_
I want to explore haptic and touch-related things in the virtual world. That’s my main concern. For now people focus more on visual and sound, they focus less on touch, at least in city life. But when you are walking in the forest in nature, you can open your senses through touch. Another idea is about using material that is forgotten or discarded in the physical world. But in the virtual world, we pick it up, they get a second life. This material we collected from the RCA grad show, an artist didn’t need it after, and these tree trunks we found near my accommodation. In the virtual world, they get a new life.
What is important about interaction in your work?
Wei Lin @weilin8553 & Tianyuan @tianyuan_zhang_
In the interaction of my work with the viewer, the viewer gives a different life to the world – the interaction is also a communication between my world and the viewer. Because they can touch different things and different positions in the world, they create different experiences – no one with the same experience. I think the interaction gives the world more liveness, that’s what is most important.
How do you feel about code as a medium for making art?
Code for me makes things new and unexpected – it’s dynamic. When I draw something by hand, I cannot make it move and cannot make it interactive. Drawing shapes based on math is hard for hand drawing, but I can do this with code easily. For example, I play with fractals. At first, the simplest fractal tree, making the branch become two, four and eight branches. Later I discovered the L-system. You generate them by using a simple rule, and it makes a beautiful shape that your brain cannot expect. So then, changing the rules to make new things becomes very fun for me. What machines can do, humans cannot imagine, but humans can prompt it.
To me, it’s just a different medium, it’s not very special. 100 years ago, people used oil and sculpture because they lived in their era and they had that kind of medium to use. But we live in the 21st century, so it’s time to use new media. It’s just a different medium that represents the same things. Artists report what is happening, what happens even in an hour. So I’m choosing this medium, to use, represent, express my time.
The code is very exciting but it’s not the most important thing to me. The main thing is the idea, if the idea speaks for itself and is strong enough and I can move forward to create a physical piece or a performance. My projects always use the simplest code. I think that that’s something beautiful about this – is that you don’t need to do anything complex to create, some people are doing crazy things, then there’s somebody doing very simple, neat, minimalistic projects. It’s amazing that I get to see a lot of different approaches happening around me. It’s very inspirational and I don’t know, I feel blessed. I love being in this environment, when would you be able to be surrounded by art all the time? It’s amazing.
