Painting your Odyssey focuses on the exploration of using multiple senses to attain a deeper and richer engagement with one’s surroundings. This particular exploration will focus on how the phenomenon of Synesthesia allows people to experience the world differently.
The world we live in today is often fast-paced, especially with the presence of social media. Our attention spans are getting shorter and many are often more gravitated towards results rather than patient process. It is hence easy for us to gloss over the many details present in our surroundings that can be experienced as long as we engage with our senses.
By engaging in multiple senses, this project hopes that people will also be able to process their everyday thoughts and life experiences through a different lens: one that allows a better understanding of self.
Head on to paintingyourodyssey.com to being your journey and experience!
Singapore is well-known around the world for its multi-racialism which consists of a few main races such as Indians, Chinese and Malay. It is known that the Chinese race can be broken down into further groups such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka. Though this knowledge is common in Singapore, not many know that the Malay race can be broken down to different groups too, like the Chinese. Majority of the Malay race consists of Singaporeans whose ancestry comes from Indonesia such as the Javanese, Boyanese, Bugis and Minangkabaus.
This project aims to tell a narrative of a family of Javanese heritage living in modern Singapore through the medium of Batik. Its designs are filled with different motifs and colour to represent the stories that were shared during the interviews with the chosen individuals from 4 different generations. A zine book will also assist in describing the information of the Batik and the video interview will aid with the understanding of the stories shared.
www.sinisterworlds.com
Sinister Worlds studies how an uneasy mental state manifests into a vivid and surreal environment. The state of uneasiness shares similar characteristics inspired by overwhelming environments like amusement parks.
While such environments brim with wonder and thrill, they are also built on manufactured and artificial technology, and this reality starts to crumble once we start to pry its hidden mechanics. Just like feelings of uneasiness, it manipulates us into perceiving hidden threats, leading to constant cycles of anxious habits and vivid imagination.
Hence, this project explores the medium of illustration and symbolism to design a fictitious world manifested from the uneasy mind. Through a surreal illustrated interactive web platform, it aims to provoke a sense of wonder and introspection, yet also establish an unsettling atmosphere using the paradox of dark subject matter in a utopia setting. Sinister World represents the hidden alternate ego of human nature, revealing where fears and uneasiness are usually obscured, and aims to be a space of comfort for visitors to understand and relate their uneasiness, and reminds that no one is alone in an uncertain world.
Cog in the Machine is an experimental graphic novel that takes a posthuman approach to narrativity and design. The project seeks to use themes of technology to not only provide answers about our place in the universe as humans, but also to raise questions that contribute to the ongoing posthuman dialogue. The graphic novel features narrative and visuals produced in collaboration with open-source artificial intelligence models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer Vr. 2 (GPT-2) by OpenAI and Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) by Microsoft Deep Learning Technology Centre.
The narrative is inspired by recent developments in biotechnology in Singapore such as culturing meat with stem cells, genome editing on animals and the implications of such changes. Visual communication will play a critical role in making these unseen subjects tangible to the general public, enabling them to comprehend subjects that are beyond their visual scope — and, in turn, encourage bridging the worlds of visual arts and technology.
Dialects are considered an essential part of what identifies us as Singaporeans. Yet, people of my generation seem to be slowly losing connection with this dying art. Apart from the inability to communicate with the older generation, it is also a problem when our sense of identity gets eroded. This project serves to bring back the appreciation for dialects amongst the younger generation so that we can own a shared sense of identity and experience as Singaporeans. The objectives of the project involve exposing the younger generation to the beauty of dialects via a more active approach whereby content in dialects will be delivered on the online platforms they frequent before engaging them in the actual learning process, unlike existing works which are more passive in nature. The main deliverables will be motion graphics in and about dialects on online platforms to raise awareness.
