S H A W N T A N G

Summer 2020

Advisor: Daniele Profeta

  While zooming-in and zooming-out in a multi-perspectival digital bubble seems to have become the ubiquitous mode of self-orientation, it is important to recognize that such environment, far from being a purely descriptive, passive representation of an ‘external reality’, performs as a cognitive agent of cultural organization. A strange loop is in place here: our worldviews of the development of specific modes of representation, of engagement with the world, and in turn they begin to have an impact in that same world, becoming an active element in the way we understand it. Put more simply, it is the technologies through which we see and experience the world that define the way we construct it. 

00 - OBJECTIVE

 In this project, we leverage immersive modes of representation, and what we define as a series of ‘Planetary Images’, to reflect on our engagement with the built environment. Since the late eighteenth century, from a newly acquired elevated point of view with mountaineering and air-balloon fights, panoramic views have shaped the way in which we engage with the world around us as well as produced experimental means of representing landscape.

If Bourrit’s early illustrations of Mont Buet aimed to accurately depict a 360-degree view of the landscape as a way to acquire scientific mastery of the surrounding territory, today #tinyplanets pop-up on our social media feeds as trending images of a digitally inhabited landscape.This project engages with these modes of representation as active agents shaping the way in which we can understand (and design) the world around us: a series of Petite Planets to continue asking questions about the cities and landscapes that we aim to construct. 

01 - INTRO

With scenes painting a juxtaposition between dream and reality, the initial composition explores representations of our very innate desires and excitements towards uncertainties. With vivid yet unrecognizable geographic locations, early images show the landscape that, hopefully, we can all connect to - colorful and levitating afterlife kind of world we see in the dreams, whilst hinting the struggles and entanglements with the not so exciting reality. The unease, perhaps, does not point us to the appalment towards the physical or geopolitical reality we reside in, but the familiarity instead. We fear familiarity like we fear death and the very same silence they share. Like the pause at the end of a nocturne, the key resets, C minor lingers, dissolving in the steam of tea. So we chase after the unknown, the unfamiliar facets of the world, only to realize that we are only truly near the unknown when we choose to not know, not seek, not chase. 

Quite self-explanatory, yet the act of not knowing cannot be accomplished by a conscious mind. In other words, we cannot not know the familiarity, nor we cannot unlearn things we already know. Then when and where do we? I think, in the dream - the only place in which we are less constrained by the thoughts of worrying and the conscious act of knowing. Now, since knowing is all we know how to live, won't 'not knowing' be dangerous?

The argument here is that it's better to not know the unknown of tomorrow than to not know the known of today. Looking into today's situation, where an epidemic taking over the world and left people fearing about the future, the epidemic is not merely as destructive as the minds and words that cause confusion on the current situation. For the most of it, it's the shift of meaning/conception in ordinary words, the proximity of entities, and the unfamiliarity of the newly organized 'scale' in the society that cause the confusion. We are experiencing many things at the moment, 

Then there comes an important question, 

Is it important? 

Are we living?

02 - TERRAFORMING

Three sets of digital terrains evolving into tiny planets through a polar perspectival manipulation, pivoting around the known and unknown through toying with the familiar elements in our world. The rainbow, the terrain, the sky, and the globe; accompanying the grounded, levitated, illuminated and dimmed properties. Could it be a battlefield, with bits of rainbows on the ground, casting shadows of the last bit of humanity; could it be a riverbed, polished rock reflecting the sky in the light of dawn. 

03 - TINY PLANETS

Tiny Planets take shape through polar perspectival manipulation of the previous panoramas. While taking a different form of representation, it provides a new way of seeing the terrain. The perceptions towards the similar terrains have now become estranged yet familiar - it's strange that we lost the sense of scale, the object to the sky, the sky to the ground... yet it's familiar in that we subconsciously recognize the similar textures and shapes. The fact that the planet imagery reveals it as a globe, resembling our planet Earth, leads us to know interpret the terrain as a planet-like object with possible ecosystems. All at once, excitements and fascinations towards the familiar unknown have been fueled.

04 - EUPHORIA, EUPHORIA

If you get there by noon, surely
it will be all right; but the seconds
are deadly.  

 When the instant joy, that moment of ecstasy, taking over our body then slowly runs away along the river, leaving no trace. When aftermath of the happening is no longer significant, we are urged to just stay in the moment, the moment of ecstasy. 

Upon depicting and shaping a conscious state of euphoria through landscapes and textures that we only see in the dream, with resemblance to the familiar reality, 'Euphoria' explores dreamscapes and excitements we share towards the unknown.

It's just as palpable for it to be than not to be. 'Euphoria' is not meant to represent, but to visualize.

so deliberately,
no one would ever guess
that right there under your shirt
the sun is dancing on water. 

---PHILIP APPLEMAN