Spatial Experiences • 2025
../ (Part 2)
Role
Designer
Timeline
Fall 2024
Skills
Installation Design
Sculpture
Interactive Experience
Tools
Touch Designer
Overview
An interactive digital installation exposing how grids erase hierarchy through uniformity
By altering image scale in response to physical actions, the work demonstrates how attention and meaning can be manufactured through curation; and how the opposite is true as well.
Initial test run of project
Exploration
Image curation is important.
As an ex-gallery assistant and photographer, I have much to say about curation. But long story short—in a single arrangement, equally sized images are equally important.
It’s hard to tell what matters the most in a uniform grid.
Our eyes are drawn to the top left, but without it or after it? How do you tell where to go? Photo layouts are not neutral containers but active agents.
Photo apps are our memory banks.
If we’re not mindful about how we interact, subconscious values of images will become similar because they exist in the grid.
Goal:
Show that grids impact hierarchy.
Comparison over time is the main tool.
The project grid structure needs to evolve and “break” within the time it takes someone to interact once then pass by later.
Time and computational power were limited.
After attempting an unsupervised machine learning model, I realized the project wouldn’t finish at the rate I was moving at. So, I went with Touch Designer, a Teachable Machine plug-in, and Kinect Azure to focus on emulating this feeling of hierarchy.
Execution
Final Product
Although the final product didn’t show up the way I wanted it to, considering mishaps in location and projection material, I was happy with what I had gotten done.
Reflections
Key Takeaways
Sometimes, you have to kill puppies.
I really wanted to code a true unsupervised machine learning model and link it into Touch Designer. But with the other half of this project, and my lack of expertise, there just wasn’t enough time. So I had to get rid of a core part of the project that excited me for the sake of getting the message across.
Double (and even triple)-checking isn’t enough.
Maybe because of some miscommunication between me and the department, the materials that I wanted for the exhibition and the lighting conditions of the location were not what I had asked for. So, even on the day of, I was scrambling to get things together.
Overvaluing aesthetics can get in the way.
I tried to make the work align with my desired abstract aesthetic, but another layer of deciphering made my own data collection later difficult to process as “breaking the grid” made it difficult for participants to identify where to look.
Thanks for reading!
Type of Project • Medium • Date
Project Title
Type of Project • Medium • Date