APD Week #1 - Play and Self

Interactive Work Demo(https://youtu.be/_-k_KGWNGIU)

• Theme

In response to the theme of Play and Self, I created an interactive work by mimicking my soul separating from my body and it sneaks inside, plays around and observes my inner spirit from a third-person perspective. It is a form of play that the audience can interact with it and know about my personalities.

• Method

1. I find a quiet place (my room actually), adjust a comfortable posture, play soothing music, take deep breaths and start mediation. Imagine I am looking at myself from a third-person perspective, evaluating what are the most striking characteristics of myself.
2. Created four translucent boxes with different symbols of personalities inside. The red box of firing flame represents a young excitement of insisting on my interest area. The blue box of rain represents my emotional and sensitive feelings. The green box of a TV playing Tom and Jerry means that I keep a pure lens observing the world or I love entertaining. The yellow box of flowers is a peaceful and romantic corner of me.
3. Add a heartbeat background audio to show the space is inside my body. Add other related audios for boxes to let the play be more immersive
4. The environment is open and dark to show it is a separate space from the world
5. (p.s. I created fire, rain, and floating light spots above flowers using particle systems in Unreal Engine. I made a TV model by 3ds Max, Tom and Jerry video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJFxTsX0Ok0&t=18s , audios from EpidemicSound website, flowers are free assets from Unreal.

• Context

Chery(2017) states that self-observation is a kind of practice that which the observer transfers his focus to the inner world as a neutral person without judgments on what you’re thinking, feeling and doing.

I remember I had an amazing experience of lying in an installation named 8Hz White Meditation Box designed by Xin Wang. I was asked to put on a white cloth and hear guiding audios through headphones, lying Inside an airtight cabin with only incandescent lamps and mirrors. I followed the soothing audio to change my consciousness state and experience spiritual healing and inner spiritual exploration. It’s interesting that I felt I was dead once I was sent into the box. My soul was leaving my body and arrived in a very open wide white place without anything. But as long as I dive deeper, I would find memories and things that I believed to be important appear in front of me. And I was observing myself from a third perspective.

Not only the 8Hz White Meditation Box designed by Xin Wang gives me the idea of building another environment outside everything and observing myself jumping out of my body, but I also draw inspiration from the anime Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. There is one episode talking about others going inside the inner spirit of the main characters. The environment inside is wide and it has things representing their psychological states, and there is also a kernel of the true self.

• Reflection

During the self-observative mediation, it is surprising that I found it is easier to describe myself from a neutral person's view after immersing myself in the mediation than directly speaking out any characteristics.

Although there are only four boxes in my responses, it provides a form of expressing self-observation by playing inside the inner spiritual space. If add aside audios that I am saying something in the tone of that specific personality to those boxes, and play them when getting close to the box, the response will express myself better. Besides, inspired by Duncan’s suggestion, it’s interesting when you stand between two boxes and hear a sound mixture to experience a combination of two personalities.