The Surrealistic Camellia World: 

My Unconscious Mind

Link: https://vimeo.com/893017028?share=copy

Script

Research Area

For this project, I have created a 3D Digital Environment where players can freely explore. I have set my research area as a playable 3D digital space because of my interest in 3D modelling, environmental design, and presenting my work in an exhibition manner. The 3D digital space has allowed me to express my identity. Audiences can understand its expression naturally while they are exploring the space. 

Research Question

I tried to find my artistic identity throughout my academic journey because I wanted to set my unique style of expression. Consequently, I must first understand myself to build my standards, which I could use during my artistic journey. I started to learn my pattern from childhood to see how I have been through the past. I have endured stormy hardships, and that experience eventually has fed me to grow stronger against more giant upcoming storms. The process seems like a camellia flower because it also patiently goes through the harsh winter to bloom its flower. 

Throughout my school years, I tried to express myself as a camellia flower in various ways. I liked a surrealist digital drawing of my unconscious mind and a collage of videos out of many different works. However, I felt a limitation with my 2D presentation since they communicated passively with the limited information given to the audience. I could improve this by communicating effectively using digital technologies to connect those two works. Therefore, I wanted to research if the depth of three-dimensional space can help audiences better understand the work throughout the exploration. 

Mechanic

For this project, I created the space with surrealist paintings, collage videos, and 3D assets of a captain's room, falling snow, an umbrella, and a space skybox. 

Drawing

It is an image of my unconscious mind. My mind should be a spacious house where different sides of me can live in one place. Out of many rooms, I have decided to illustrate a bedroom because it is the most personal area of the house to show someone's personality well. 

The bedroom has a big camellia tree forest inside a small geometric room. The bedroom is where people get their energy from sleep, so I intentionally set the season as spring to indicate a space where I can start my bright day to prepare for the next season. There are some spring flowers, a germinated seed, and fallen camellia flowers from trees after the winter since it is the spring season. I have blended different human body parts into various elements to create a dreamy mood. I also desaturated the foreground tree compared to the saturated background to make the drawing more ironic by putting it in a different order for a more ironic mood. 

Collage Video

The video blends shots expressing my experience in a new environment and Camellia's journey. I wanted to narrate that our sadness or hardships, like a cold winter, will end, and we can bloom our potential from the pain based on my personal experience. I wanted people to gather meaningless pieces into one to find a whole meaning. I put a simple winter storm as a background sound because I want people to focus on the video. At the same time, it works as a background setting to tell the event is happening during winter. After the camellia blooms and everything has settled, the storm ends.

• It is me expressing the snowstorm. 

• I tried to show the busy downtown life from my perspective. And my first impression of the cityscape was coldness by visualizing the skyscraper in a blueish colour. Then, the pain started in the unfamiliar environment. 

• The flower symbolizes me, and the water represents sadness. 

• However, that sadness will eventually stop, and we can grow stronger while returning everything to routine. 

• I hope that we can grow from the pain when that pain will end. 

3D Meshes

I created a captain room while considering what kind of space I should build. I wanted to make a space that can highlight the concept of the journey since the narrative is about the growth within the journey. I wanted players to feel like they became captains who travelled into my unconscious mind. 

When I created a model, I used antique wooden furniture as my reference photo because captains usually do not put fancy and new furniture inside their boats. Those types of furniture are created in different wooden pieces. For a realistic look, I started them in several pieces and put them together by placing those pieces in the proper form. The gaps between those pieces made the model more realistic. Moreover, the wireframe would get too complicated if I connected everything as one whole mass. 

Keeping the object's wireframe simple is better, or it will get too heavy. Wireframe was the most complex and essential part of the job. Wireframe connects each vertex in a square shape to keep the proper form in rendering mode or when softening the form. Moreover, it is a fundamental job for the texturing to not create any texturing stretch or distortion. 

Contexture Review

Before starting my project, I researched professionals' work to learn how to build a 3D environment. I used "Dreams of Dali: 360-Degree Video," "Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience," and Team Lab's "Future World: Where Art Meets Science" as references. 

Dreams of Dali: 360-Degree Video

"Dreams of Dali: 360-Degree Video" uses VR technology to create an immersive environment where audiences can explore the surrealistic world, which has developed based on his painting Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's "Angelus." Millet's couple transformed Dali's painting, which he drew while attending an elementary school, into the VR world.

Application:

This work was a significant example for me to build a surrealist world. I wanted to create a surrealistic atmosphere since I am expanding 2D surrealist painting into 3D space. I displayed lots of randomness to express the irony in the work of space. For example, the drawing is ironic because the big forest is trapped inside a small geometric room. I apply this concept to the space arrangement in the same way. I put the collage video of our large society in a frame of small furniture form as a texture.

Moreover, the realistic scene of the video and the dreamly look of the painting are ironic combinations since they are contrasted but related in their narratives. The room in a universe is also ironic and random. Lastly, I put the umbrella on the ceiling of the room. I also put the particle system on the top of the umbrella so the snow particles can go through the object. It is ironic since the umbrella does not function as a ceiling to protect the snow. At the same time, it also explains one of the background settings: the pain comes from harshness like winter. The snow also contrasts with the picture's spring scene to create irony.

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience is an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's paintings in an immersive space. Audiences can sense that they are exploring the inside of the picture with their projection mapping onto walls, ceilings, and floors. They can watch the projection desirably. They can lie down on a couch to see the starry night or locate themselves in a designated spot that the exhibition asked for so that their displacement can also be a part of the work for the immersive experience. 

Application: 

I have inspired their way of using projection mapping on the 3D space wall. When I expanded the 2D drawing into a three-dimensional way, I used their way of projecting the work on all sides of the walls of the space. I tried to make their experience different by filling the space with the furniture. They can locate themselves anywhere to see the work of art. Also, the video is framed differently depending on the surface of the objects, so the different angles of view can give them a different feeling. 

Team Lab: "Future World: Where Art Meets Science"

Team Lab's work effectively uses creative coding, which is the usage of computer science in creative coding to create real-time performance. It will become an essential influence for my subsequent stage when I make a sensory experience from the interaction.

Literature Review

Parallax Effect 

Parallax Effect is a filmmaker's way of creating depth with the 3D effect glasses. It makes people see two types of illusion: in the front and behind the screen. With digital technology, I can create 3D scenery. Still, the parallax effect helps me to understand the impact of the 3D presentation. 

The foreground, the illusion in front of the screen, works like a focal point that catches the audience's attention to evoke desirable emotive responses. The illusion behind the screen will create the movement of the viewer's sight based on the viewer's interest in drawing a whole picture of the situation. The creator can direct the audience's emotion toward the situation to deliver a particular message. 

Application:

When I build a communicative space, I create the functionality based on compelling viewing. The foreground of the space is furniture, with the collage video as a texture. I wanted to present my personal experimental video to create empathy for people to understand the pattern of our lives by seeing the world through my perspective before they see the background of the space. The background of the space is a surrealist drawing. The emotional response from the work in the foreground can apply when they are viewing the picture. I wanted the foreground to be an additional explanation of the drawing by finding the ironic connection between those two different elements. 

Critical Play 

Critical play is a design theory by Mary Flanagan. It is a practice of building the play environment based on the essential aspect of human life, and it is to "start with the workings of the human mind." Therefore, surrealism, which studies the unconscious mind, works well with the design theory. Surrealist games were based on Victorian-era parlour games, but they pushed "activity into an exploration" (156).

Exploration means players have their unique play experience by walking in the depths of the 3D space. Therefore, I adopted the learning of an element of the everyday space people used for the surrealist game. Accordingly, they used drawings to create "a hallucinatory series of contradictory images rose before" the viewer's eyes. They were "superposing themselves one upon the other" (156).

Application:

I also wanted to create a surrealistic presentation, so I focused on creating an ironic atmosphere. I can create depth in the space by crafting the 3D digital environment using technology, so I focused on making the contradictory connectivity between mechanics by superposing themselves one upon the other. Consequently, the collage of videos of realistic view superposed on a background surrealistic drawing. Ultimately, the ironic mood interests viewers and makes them want to investigate the narrative environment more. 

Going Forward

In the future, I want to become an artist who can positively influence societal change. I want our globalized society to find harmony by accepting and respecting each other's differences. 

Change needs to happen within us since we cannot force others to change in our desirable way. Instead, we can influence one another by being a good example. We can change when we believe we must change by acquiring insight into our character. It is a process of self-discovery. A game with an aesthetic Expression component as a central element can accomplish the goal. 

However, this needs to happen step by step. I decided to build the project in three stages. This project was my first step, and the research area was 3D digital space, which can accomplish the aesthetic goal of narrative by building the space based on a 2D drawing and creating the connection within the depth of the space. I will use this project as a fundamental point to make an interactive performance to create a "game as sense-pleasure." 

Reactive pieces can make players believe it is another reality through the sensory experience. I will use a VR camera to make the experience more realistic. The interactive performances will be built based on Dadaist's way of creating "rule-based systems" by bringing "meaning to the every day by altering participant relationships to the world" (156). It is a stage to build an immersive environment which can accomplish the aesthetic goal of sensation before I move on to the next stage of reaching the aesthetic goal of expression for societal influence.