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ANANSI Radio Club: Pilot Broadcast2023
NAIROBI
During the Occupy The Mall festival in Nairobi, Kenya, I had the pleasure of participating in Santuri Electronic Music Academy’s Santuri Signal
360° livestream broadcast.
For the performance, I live coded a track using SonicPi, played music and audio art pieces by from a number of my aliases (including SUNJIR0 and A9C-388), played a recording of the prose piece the pines and performed four pieces of poetry live. The goal for the set was to create an “alien radio broadcast” featuring out-of-this-realm music and writing from a number of my aliases scattered around the pluriverse, as well as to pilot a platform for the ANANSI Revolutionary Collective to do future radio broadcasts.
360° livestream broadcast.
For the performance, I live coded a track using SonicPi, played music and audio art pieces by from a number of my aliases (including SUNJIR0 and A9C-388), played a recording of the prose piece the pines and performed four pieces of poetry live. The goal for the set was to create an “alien radio broadcast” featuring out-of-this-realm music and writing from a number of my aliases scattered around the pluriverse, as well as to pilot a platform for the ANANSI Revolutionary Collective to do future radio broadcasts.
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Nafasi Art Space/əbˈstrakt/
2023
DAR ES SALAAM
- In July and August of 2023, I had the pleasure of completing a residency at the Nafasi Art Space in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Throughout the five weeks, I produced works across a variety of digital media and printed a limited collection of transparent works. The residency culminated in the show /əbˈstrakt/.
- In the rich tapestry of language, "abstract" emerges as a word of contradictions – Merriam-Webster alone presents 15 variations, each wrestling for dominance. This exhibition, /əbˈstrakt/, stands at the crossroads of these linguistic tensions. The most obvious of these tensions is between the almost anarchic adjective used to describe aesthetics that hide or obfuscate their meaning and the more authoritarian verb used to reduce complex subjects and phenomena into simpler and more convenient terms. This exhibition exists in the no man's land of this war of the words, delving into the clash between an unruly aesthetic and a commanding reduction, wielding their clash as a narrative force.
At its core, this collection unravels the violence inherent in abstraction, while making use of aesthetics that defy easy interpretation. The exhibit showcases an array of digital creations – VR spaces, 3D models and paintings, vivid 2D images crafted with Blender, and video art.
SUN JIR0 masterfully transcends the utilitarian boundaries often ascribed to digital art. With creations birthed not for practicality, but for the sake of art itself, the artist subverts the norm of the media. This collection is the result of an embodied and expressive approach to creation, with the artist making work often directly in virtual reality, to expand the artistic rather than technological bounds of the medium.
This exhibition comprises a number of component series that all came to a head during SUN JIR0’s residency with Nafasi Art Space. Featured in this collection are pieces from the “Caste” series of abstract geometric 3D models; “Virtual Geography,” a series of renders and 3D models of landscapes made in VR; “Panoption,” a series of 2D image renders that make heavy use of transparency; and “Any Other Name,” a collection of pieces ranging 3D models and 2D renders that tackle the themes of the exhibition more broadly.
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SUCKERS
2018
上海 / SHANGHAI
Interactive Media Arts Capstone. Mixed reality docu-fiction series investigating the lives of vampires living in Shanghai.
Explored all aspects of production while aiming to learn about humanity through our diverse mythology around vampires.
The final iteration of the project was developed as a part of my capstone course work, but it is the result of merging two seperate inquiries: an exploration of UX design for XR and a docu-fictional approach to film making explored in two previous courses.
Explored all aspects of production while aiming to learn about humanity through our diverse mythology around vampires.
The final iteration of the project was developed as a part of my capstone course work, but it is the result of merging two seperate inquiries: an exploration of UX design for XR and a docu-fictional approach to film making explored in two previous courses.
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Lo-Fi VR
2017 - 2018
上海 / SHANGHAI
深圳 / SHENZHEN
Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking on the importance of Low Fidelity (Lo-Fi) Virtual Reality (VR) in the early stages of development of VR as an artistic medium. My first formal presentation was at the 2017 Global Cre8 Summit, but a few months later I made adjustments to the slides to include even more actionable information for those interested in beginning their journey in VR art making.
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Depersonalization 2017
NEW YORK
Depersonalization is a personal video poem made of 360º photos reflecting on the titular mental health condition. The piece made use of colors, computer generated voice, and the “1st person” VR mode in order to emulate the experience of depersonalization.
