Suntopia is an ongoing collaborative world-building project that explores what futures may result from a green transition in global energy relations. The project positions multimedia contributions into a speculative, poly-vocal fiction that asks what a fully solar-powered world could be. Combining multiple narratives to produce a pluralistic view of how technologies of energy production impact the economic, cultural and spiritual structures that give shape to our humanity.

Initially developed by Yujin Joung, Sandu Cojocari, Rawan Khater, Nawon Koo, & How Melnyczuk, the project formed part of The Metabolic Sublime - a workshop at Medialab Matadero in Madrid. The future expectation is to invite further contributions from a widening collective of writers and creatives, to craft a richer world that supersedes the sum of its parts.

Raising questions about machine consciousness and non-human creativity, Wool-gather brings together aeromancy, day-dreaming and cloud watching through machine learning and image processing. Pointing an object detection algorithm at the sky above Vilnius, the work uses the shapes of the clouds to generate meandering anecdotes and make whimsical predictions about the future.

Accessing real-time live streams from across the internet, Silver Coord is a VR work that presents visions from around the world. The work draws on the esoteric practice of astral projection and provides a different way to access the real world via the virtual; offering a slower, more meditative space to contrast the everyday world of Instagram and Zoom. As every corner of the earth becomes more and more watched, measured, and controlled, this work looks to repurpose that surveillance as an opportunity for reflection.

Cone of Power is a video work exploring extractive capitalism, systems of control and collective acts of resistance. The work combines footage from recent protest movements in Hong Kong, United States and Myanmar, with clips that document methods of industrial production. Through CCTV footage, object detection algorithms and diagrammatic 3D renderings, the work explores the role moving images have within late capitalism. Looking to the cone of power ritual for inspiration, the work revolves around questions of what covens we can form and what powers we can focus.

Supercollager is an ongoing project exploring photography and image-making in dialogue with machine learning and computer vision.

The work synthesises new images from multiple inputs using a deep learning model. It builds these from its own understanding of visual objects found in my catalog of personal photographs.

The work draws on Barthes' theory of the punctum and studium, alongside Vilém Flusser's concept of the apparatus and the technological program.

You can see more images from this project in a post I made here

Produced in collaboration with writer/curator Alisa Blakeney, the project aimed to re-conceptualize architecture as a model of co-existence. By investigating non-human forms of structure, social organisation, and perception, the work seeks to ask the question: what relations of care can be cultivated to address environmental devastation?

Consisting of a single-channel video & a risograph zine, switching between English and Mandarin, the form allowed ideas to be presented via alternative approaches to temporality and cultural particularities.

The work was exhibited at Taipei Artist Village in September 2019.

Audio narrated by 莊聿萱 with assistance from 鍾盈盈.

Translation by 韞藝術工作室 Yun Art Studio.

Produced as part of the inaugural Computational Art Residency, in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum and Goldsmiths College, Object Permanence is an investigation into the legacies of colonial atrocity that exist in institutional archives.

By cross-referencing historical dates, names and places against key fields in the V&A’s digital database, the work draws out objects from the museum's collection acquired during three specific acts of British colonial aggression: the First Indian War for Independence in 1857, the sacking of the Summer Palace in China during 1860, and the Maqdala expedition into Ethiopia in 1868.

Presented at the V&A's Digital Design weekend 2018, the work projected photographs of these objects on to screens made of the same material that wraps the objects in storage. Around this were placed free standing speakers, each playing found audio explaining the history and historical aftermath of the historical events.

Gail is a chatbot that was developed as part of The Bureau of Meteoranxiety project, in collaboration with Olivia Tartaglia and Alex Tate. It was exhibited as part of Next Wave festival at the Blindside Gallery, Melbourne in 2018.

The work allowed participants to discuss their anxieties about climate change. It used implementations of conversational AI that are becoming increasingly common as a way for corporations to scale their customer services, whilst laying off real employees. As such, the clinical uncaring nature of the bot is often less than comforting and the conversations err on the side of the strange and alienating.

Review of Gail and The Bureau of Meteoranxiety via The Guardian

Ratio Club was a free ten-week workshop program exploring computation as creative practice. Participants took part in a series of sessions blending practical tutorials with critical discussions.

The workshops were structured to introduce creative practitioners to basic programming concepts, algorithmic approaches to digital design and modeling, and strategies for employing these in their artistic practice.

Final VR Showcase

Rrosetta uses machine-learning to craft personalised zines using sensitive data. Drawing the niche and often intimate subculture of self-publishing into wider debates about privacy, automation and AI, this project set out to examine questions about the price, cost and value of identity under late capitalism.

Exhibited as a website and installation, the work invited participants to consented to having their outbox emails read and analysed in exchange for a bespoke one-off publication. This would be printed automatically in the exhibition space for the participant to take home.

On The Side of Every Mountain Is Another, Smaller Mountain is a series of photographs presenting contemplative, brooding atmosphere that evokes geological deep time, depicting a set of dark rock protrusions into an ambiguous sky. The photographs were taken at dusk on the side of Cadair Idris in North Wales, where local legend holds that any who sleep on the side of the mountain will awake as either a madman or a poet. The work shows geology as a site of tension, both physically and creatively - with the fine line between inspiration and despair ever-present, just past the precipice.

A meditation on form and composition by treating digital images as a pliable surface.