→ trans-ition/trans-cendence (2023)
transition: a “girl” who walks alone at night, 2023, website
transition: a “girl” who walks alone at night, is a WebGL based website which allows accessibility and interactive storytelling that expands the definition of publication design. The website is a simulation as a website format where I navigate my body, mortality, and my fear and desire for transition/transcendence while walking back to my home from my studio. After the title page, readers walk into the intro text.
My girlfriend calls me to talk about safety protocols
in case of any potential hate crime targeting queer / trans people.
‘Call me when you Get Home.’
How has this become part of our relationship?
- Exerpt from transition: a “girl” who walks alone at night (2023)
in case of any potential hate crime targeting queer / trans people.
‘Call me when you Get Home.’
How has this become part of our relationship?
- Exerpt from transition: a “girl” who walks alone at night (2023)
The main page of the website shows the layout created with 3D scanned landmarks from my walk back home. On the path, readers can scroll and click the spinning chapters. There are a total of four chapters: Anatomy lesson, Typeface, Diagram, UV map.
The website displayed on a custom made table and TV monitor frame. The table has an illustration of a figure, who is revealing its open gut, and text diagrams. The figure’s open gut is where the readers are able to experience the simulation.
3D Digital Fabrication
Digital fabrication process (left) CNC (right) created table top design with illustrator
“In many cutaways of stock 3D models of human
bodies, the interior tends to reveal itself as
empty, the space dotted by faint vertices and
lines suggesting a rigid, but invisible, skeleton.”
– Nora Khan, from “Sondra Perry: Typhoon Coming On”
bodies, the interior tends to reveal itself as
empty, the space dotted by faint vertices and
lines suggesting a rigid, but invisible, skeleton.”
– Nora Khan, from “Sondra Perry: Typhoon Coming On”
During my first year as an MFA candidate, I honed my interest in 3D technology and autofictional queer narratives. After working with numerous mediums in my art practice, it wasn’t until this year that I realized why I felt so at home, almost euphoric, when using 3D modeling in my own work. Perhaps the reason I’m so drawn to 3D models is that they fully embrace the transitional state of being. I am a “girl.” — I look like one, at least for the moment. Much like the facade of a 3D UV map and mesh, my body has always felt like a scan of people who look at me. But it isn’t empty. You see, if the body is empty, it couldn’t protest and intervene in its own manipulation. I don’t know why I started drawing a body on a ground/operation table with an open gut. I had no explanation other than “it” is my alien body, and I want to let “it” talk back. Even in art history, let alone medical history, the body on the operation table, probed by the white hetero gaze, is voiceless. If they were to protest and take their own agency, they would become a vengeful Frankenstein’s monster, my alien “it”... which is kind of sick.
transition: a “girl” who walks alone at night, 2023, website
MFA Candidacy Publication
trans-ition/trans-cendence: MFA candidcay proposal, 2023, Cover: laser engraving on clear plexi, Pages: risograph, coil binding