Artist; Troublemaker; Mr.
Participatory Project, 2020
The work encourages human participants to make friends with trees, to talk to it and to hug it, during which a situation of human and tree (nature) participate together is created and relationships between humans and trees are formed.
Visit its website: here
(proposal) Public Installation, 2020
As a original resident of a village in the city(城中村) that has spent almost his whole life outside the village, I am, somehow, obsessed with the create density of the village in the city, and the huge contrast between the village and the city around it. The village in the city is the Mainland version of Kowloon Walled City, with the aesthetic of dystopia, where is, however, the place for dream.
By this work I want to create a window, a bridge, an opportunity for two completely different groups of people to have a view of something they might have never seen in their life. The tenants in the village can hardly imagine that people living in the same city, just a kilometer away, can afford abroad travels twice a year. What does the outside world looks like? Those who travel abroad every year, might have no idea that there is still people living in such an environment, in the village, although the village is just a kilometer away from their home. They live in the same city, but in two universes.
We have seen so many cyberpunk cities in movies and novels, Guangzhou (and many cities in Mainland) might just become one in the future. Urbanization always shows its bright side to us, and leave the dark side in shadow. It promises with the stories of the minor that realized their city dreams, so we often ignore the major of the new immigrants who are the loser in the game, struggling in the edge, under the shadow of the CBD towers.
But they have not submitted, they still have their dreams, and that is enough for them to be admirable.
If you are a potential sponsor, click here for the budget or contact me @ real.john.chueng@gmail.com
Video Essay, 2020
wood cut, 2020
Web Based Digital Experience, 2020
with Lizzie Wee, Julie Cahannes, Gigi Koh; exhibited in the online Hacking-Greta show, 2020
In this digital experience, we speculate possible iterations of the future whereby our ecology has revived/ collapsed, and examine the possible implications of Greta’s legacy as an icon. Players are free to explore the digital landscape to piece together their interpretations of the story. Foregrounding the experience with the announcement of Greta’s death, we invite participants to immerse in these realities, and then reconsider the actions they can take in the present to shape a future they desire.
Official Website: www.holygreta.com (Your browser might alert a SSL certificate error as the content is hosted by ZHdK and the SSL certificate is not for this domain)
Alternative Link: here (Content hosted on GitHub, there no SSL issue)
AR installation, 2020
“Earths are not flat, Earths are not round, Earths are cubes” – John C ,2020
The idea of creating cubic earths comes from the experience of playing Minecraft when I was younger. Minecraft is totally digital, why not make it possible to create your earths in the physical world? Therefore, I came up with the idea of using a Rubik’s cube to make a changeable earth.
The irregular-shaped Rubik’s cube has 24 different small planes. I made 24 different 3D models of basic elements of the earth (rocks, mountains, trees, strange figures, etc.) to display on each of them. So, you can turn the cube to form your own earth with the different combination of the elements. If you restore the Rubik’s cube to the original form (in this irregular-shaped cube, that means you got 6 big flat planes), bigger models will be shown on the planes, with sun and moon replacing each other every minute – that means on this earth, one day is two minutes in our world. Different relaxing ambient music will also be played according to the appeared planes.
I chose this kind of irregular-shaped Rubik’s cube because it’s cool, when you turns it, different small planes appear on different height, with patterns I designed with the inspiration from the alien graphics in the game Outer Wilds, the cube looks like a relic from an ancient, disappeared civilization.
I think the interaction with a Rubik’s cube is very suitable for an AR artwork, it’s complicated, it requires hands and most importantly, unlike moving markers around the table, it can hardly be done in a totally digital way – it’s highly “tangible”. I think that’s also what AR means to be – a way to add digital contents to highly tangible things.
As a chaotic evil person, you know I would not stop at making peaceful, poetic cubic earths. Therefore, I also made a button, for you to push and blow up the world you built with nuclear bombs.
installation; size various, 2020
Chaotic system and fractals are some of the mosts advanced fields of mathematic researches and they are, very likely, the hidden rules that shaping our world.
When humans think they mastered the knowledge about the world, they try to play the role of God. From artificial life to another biosphere, human beings are simulating, or creating another, nature.
This work aims to create an immersive space of generated images and sounds, that give reaction to changes of the environment, temperature, humidity, human/animal passing. Remember what those theories tell us: any minimal action can lead to a brighter future, or the extinction of humanity.
A tangible twitter robot, 2020
Little Jack is a robot that reads tweets about Covid-19 from twitter and gives different responses in physical world according to the tweets it read. It will give sad faces and noise when the tweets it read are generally negative and give happy faces and noise when the tweets are positive. You can also interact with it to make it happier and it will kill it self if it’s too sad.
This idea came from the current situation: Covid-19 is sweeping all over the world and everyone is now in quarantine, meanwhile, for years we have been addicted to social media and we have let them control our life without noticing this fact. I think this is a good time for us to scrutinise what’s on social media and our relationship with the them.
This is a big, serious topic (social media and us), and I always believe that the best way to let people think about those big topics is not to make a profound speech, but to make a relaxing joke. And Little Jack is a relaxing joke, it makes you smile, and maybe have some thoughts after that, for me that’s enough.
The idea of tangible twitter robot is also very interesting, it’s like a retrograde in this more and more Matrix-like world (Think about it, now we do everything online!). Personally, I think Matrix is somewhere OK to live in, who knows this ‘real world’ is not a huge simulation? But before our technology level get to that point, I think tangible things still have their meanings.
And lastly, something about the suicide button. Here is the situation of Little Jack – it doesn’t have the courage or ability to deal with the social media control, so it can just kill itself. But we can have the courage and ability, as human beings, to make changes.
sound, 2020
Stereo work, please use a headset to listen
web based, 2020
A recipe generator. Do note that I am not responsible for anything if you want to eat something you made following its guide.