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.