‘Phonon’, named for the smallest unit of acoustic energy, is an audio-visual landscape that celebrates stillness and slowness. The installation encourages visitors to experience the environment in a more personal way, instead of consuming media voraciously to be forgotten with the next swipe.
Phonon Website
In the last two Tutorials, Christopher keenly pointed out that the current experience of our project cannot perfectly convey to the audience what we want to guide them to observe. Indeed, recently we have mainly focused on a lot of practice and experimentation, as well as learning a lot of brand-new software. Although we have a preliminary understanding of the technical details of the interactive installation, our narrative is indeed a weak link.
For this narrative, I try to study the works of other artists and find an easy-to-understand icon to help us promote the interactive narrative. Phonon created by Chinese new media artist LUYANG ZOU gave me great inspiration. She compares the sound information on the Internet to a cube-shaped Phonon and placed it in a suspended virtual space. After I understood this image, I shared it with the group. We believe that a simple shape marker will help us better narrative. And considering that we will build hardware in the interactive device, temporarily set the interactive core as a Cube that can contain content. Yixuan proposed that we can think of Cube as the data structure of the virtual world. I added that this Cube can be an extension of the physical object in the process of remaking the virtual world, is the outer digital packaging of the real object.
At the same time, as the person in charge of the scene design, I mostly referred to Phonon’s handling of space when making the schematic diagram. Although our purpose in the size of the space and the shaping link is different, this brief aesthetic style will be introduced into our project.
For the overall style, I used a large white face, supplemented by the same cube as our interactive core The Cube as a stylized setting. At the same time, we borrowed the design of some oriental temples and buildings and designed the interactive platform in the middle into a centre with a sense of ‘pure’, also to fit our true narrative.