BEYOND GARDEN is a web-VR poetry installation incorporating audio-visual lighting, ambient sound design, and an AR filter, to create a space for mourning, healing and a sense of togetherness within the confines of the browser.
What happens when we encounter poetry in a non-personal, non-teleological environment? Amidst a global pandemic and the collective sensory deprivation of quarantine isolation, how can we honor and listen to the voices of grief and survival to reimagine our entrapped realities?
What happens when we encounter poetry in a non-personal, non-teleological environment? Amidst a global pandemic and the collective sensory deprivation of quarantine isolation, how can we honor and listen to the voices of grief and survival to reimagine our entrapped realities?
Visit Beyond.Garden for the web experience
2020 LA Design Festival and featured in LIFE Magazine China, March 2022
Web VR & Spatial Audio Experience
Tools : Unity, Ableton
Creative Director: Dyan Jong
Interactive Spatial Audio and Composition: Nick Gregg
Unity Developer: Aaron Santiago
Composition: Lucy Yao
Poets: Carlina Duan , JinJin Xu , Jiaoyang Li
2020 LA Design Festival and featured in LIFE Magazine China, March 2022
Web VR & Spatial Audio Experience
Tools : Unity, Ableton
Creative Director: Dyan Jong
Interactive Spatial Audio and Composition: Nick Gregg
Unity Developer: Aaron Santiago
Composition: Lucy Yao
Poets: Carlina Duan , JinJin Xu , Jiaoyang Li
Each capsule contains a poem. As the visitor gets closer to the capsules that sprinkle the landscape, one hears cascading whispers.
By entering the capsules, the visitor enters the threshold of a poem, whispered and written by diasporic Chinese poets. In the year where live poetry readings have become a distant memory, the capsules sing to us from the afterlife.
The bilingual poems interweave Mandarin and English to collectively sing, grieve and heal towards a shared past and future.
I held two roles, composition in collaboration with Lucy Yao and the spatialization of audio.
Each poem capsule is colored to reflect the language of recitation. Poems decay at different times from different distances, with the attenuation zones intentionally overlapping to create moments where the languages fade into sonic textures.
The musical and recitation sounds were routed to two separate mixers. The mixers had 5 states, each with different levels for the sonic elements. As you enter the drone zone, the bass of the musical elements swell from below, only leaving you once you pass into the beam of light, where all ambience is cut, leaving you alone with the poem
